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THE SPORTSMAN PILOT

angle of nearly 30 to 1, the 5000 feet should be worth nearly 30 miles if you fly at the most efficient airspeed, which is about 45 to 50. As the city approaches, you realize you had underestimated the performance of which your plane was capable, for you are going to make it! Incredible, but the outskirts of Washington are below. Not wishing to risk the possibility of having to land in the city, you elect to land on the edge of town. A large golf course below looks inviting, so you circle once, open your landing spoilers and drop lightly to earth once more on the eighteenth fairway — seven hours and twenty-six minutes, 220 miles from the starting point. Though you have made many longer flights using power, none yet have given the satisfaction this one has produced and soaring has won another devotee.

In my case, the desire to soar antedates any aspirations toward military aviation. While in my senior year at California Institute of Technology, at Pasadena, we organized a club, to which a generous alumnus donated a rather seasoned and battered training glider. Illness saved my putting life and limb in jeopardy, and except for a very few dusty and erratic rides down the airport behind a wildly careening Ford, my gliding and soaring experience can be said to have begun this June at Elmira.

Lurking behind all the bogeys of Pensacola's rigorous training course there still remained a firm resolve to own and fly a sailplane. Upon my transfer to San Diego, I discovered that leisure time between sea cruises would permit me to achieve that ambition. The long tedious hours of last year's spring cruise and the subsequent Amelia Earhart search were devoted to slide rule and drafting board. With our return in August, the design had crystallized into a nearly finished form and I was ready to begin work.

While about a quarter of the time since then has been spent at sea, construction forged ahead so rapidly in my basement workshop that, as June approached, I had the temerity to apply for special leave to enter the national soaring contest. I say temerity, for the ship was still merely a pile of parts, I had never flown a sailplane and wasn't yet sure I could, least of all in competition with seasoned experts at the game. However, I banked upon my design having all the performance anticipated and succeeded in wheedling permission.

The last week before leaving for Elmira was a nightmare of activity which the friends I drafted in to help me will not forget. Working night and day we hastily assembled the various parts (my own basement is so small everything had to be built in sections and assembled on the lawn) and five o'clock of the morning scheduled for my departure for the east found us ready for testing. Having worked steadily all night, none of us was in condition to attempt a real job of testing, so I limited myself to a few straight glides and a turn or two to assure me that it really would handle all right, leaving the more advanced work of testing until my arrival at Elmira. And thus matters stood until my arrival at the contest site.

Many soaring pilots claim practical applications for the sport. It is said that certain European airlines prefer soaring pilots. The German Government must have some ulterior motives to justify the subsidy they so long have granted to soaring. Meteorological research has been enlightened upon many phenomena by the intelligent observations of soaring pilots. It is even possible that the adaptation of soaring technique to the handling of heavy, fast modern airplanes can be valuable, though my own experiments in this direction have proven negative.

But all this is non-essential. It matters not that soaring can prove itself a matter of great intrinsic worth. Can soaring but perpetuate itself as a splendid sport it now is, can it maintain its present rapid advancement, can it become to the art of flying what sails are to the sport of yachting, need we ask more?

Flying, as it was--
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hoped the collapsible plane would not shake apart on the longest flight it had ever attempted.

After five hours and forty minutes in the air, flying east by compass and checking my way by landmarks, my 100-horsepower motor sputtered to a stop about two miles away from the Hornell, N. Y., fairgrounds. I was out of gas but had 6000 feet altitude, and a long glide took me to a safe landing and a new American long distance flying record of 512 miles, as recorded by the Aero Club of America. It was the second longest flight in the world at that time.

I refilled the gas tank and flew on to Binghamton, N. Y., landing for the night on a private stock farm, as there were no landing fields available for the cross country flyer in those days. Next morning I hopped down to New York City and landed on Governor's Island, to be greeted by Aero Club officials and dozens of reporters, who surprised me tremendously by thinking I had done something worth telling the world about.

One of my more prized possessions is a beautiful diamond-studded medal presented to me by Glenn H. Curtiss for me successful flight. The walnut propeller of the plane now hangs on the wall of my library as a souvenir of my longest and luckiest trip. The rest of the plane I used for five more years until it actually wore out. I never had a flying accident while using it.

During the war excitement of 1918, I made the first series of Liberty Loan flights, "bombing" cities through the Middle-West with Liberty Bond circulars and landing at rallied in city parks to assist in the sales. Other flights I made to assist recruiting drives, for which I received special permission to war the Army uniform. Such activities kept me busy until the Armistice was signed.

After the War, exhibition flying was more popular than ever. Bigger and better stunts were the order of the day and I organized the Ruth Law Flying Circus. Since ordinary flying was of little interest, my pilots changed from plane to plane in the air. Dangling rope ladders hanging from the under-carriage of a plane helped an acrobat to change from a racing auto to a low-flying plane. Parachute jumpers contracted to drop from speeding planes and to land in the centerfield of a fairgrounds before the eyes of the customers. The public wanted to have a close up view, to see how it felt to hit the ground with a parachute after a drop of a thousand feet.

Then came wing walking, the silliest of all airplane stunts. The last year I gave public flying exhibitions, I contracted to loop while standing on top of the airplane as another pilot operated the controls. Before I perfected this stunt I received many bruises from crashing down onto the top wing as the centrifugal force of the looping plane flattened me to the upper surface. I felt like the water in a pail that is being swung in a circle.

In the spirit of "now it can be told," I will explain how I managed this stunt. To get into position I would climb out of the cockpit of an open biplane to the front edge of the wing, up over the motor cowl - trusting only to the strength of my hands to keep me from being blown into the next world. Thence I would climb to the center of the top wing. To support me, at first, I tried two guy wires fastened to the leading and trailing edge of the wing and hooked to my belt. While I was held on to the top wing by the wires, they were of little use in helping me to stand up against that terrible force, and I fell onto the wing every time we looped.

Finally we decided to try four guy wires fastened to a little harness over my shoulders so that I could push upward and stand rigid

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