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with it, after getting a pilot license. That airplane, with its same Hispano-Suiza engine is still in existence and under restoration. I flew to yellow Springs OH in July this year to see and photograph it. I had sold it in 1929 and taught the new owner to fly it from scratch. He never pranged it. Most of the restoration was carried out by a retired TWA Capt. John Thomson, until his health problems. It is now being finished by Jim Hammond, at Yellow Springs.

While in High School in 1923 I read of Juan de la Cierva;s flight at Madrid Spain in a rotary-wing aircraft. I had read of him before, during WW-I, and his experiments later with new helicopter ideas. He wrote me two very nice longhand letters explaining his autogiro. During several years of very successful barnstorming, flying at Teterboro in 1930, running an airport and an aircraft overhaul shop (for bootleggers) I kept in touch with Cierva's and Pitcairn's development of the autogiro. In 1931 I was the first individual to purchase a Pitcairn PC A-2 autogiro (with 330 HP Wright engine) and made the first trans-continental flights with a rotary-wing aircraft. Later, on the airshow circuit I developed an acrobatic performance with it and performed at airshows including the 1932 national Air races at Chicago. At the same time I was operating the old airport and the aircraft shop at home at Poughkeepsie, my home town.

When the prohibition law was repealed in 1933 my shop had no more bootlegger customers so I folded and after some varied types of flying, went with United Air Lines, flying the Boeing 247-D, the world's first modern air liner. It was the first smooth skin all metal airliner, with low wing, retractable landing gear, constant speed propellers (non-feathering) on P&W 550 HP geared engines and full de-icing - the first de-iced airliner. It was later superseded by the DC-2 and DC-3. I was based at Chicago Midway, flying the E-W route. I learned a lot from the old veteran Air mail pilots who had flown the old Post office Air Mail in the DH-4s.

In 1937 Mr. Kellett of the Kellett Autogiro Co. came to CHI and asked me to do some test flying of the newly designed Kellett autogiro, the first wingless aircraft to obtain an ATC. This turned out to be a rather hazardous way to make a living, especially for a man with a family and three kids. We modified that design to an Air Mail carrier for Eastern Air Lines and I was loaned to EAL to fly it on a one year experimental Air Mail contract to and from the roof of the Post office building in the center of Philadelphia. In the final tests of this autogiro, during what I believe to be the first high speed dive test of a rotary-wing aircraft, the rotor started to disintegrate and the aircraft flipped around so violently that I sustained several injuries, including a compression fracture of a vertebra in my neck which still bothers me. We did not understand the phenomenon of compressibility at that time. When the forward moving blades exceeded the speed of sound the outer ends of the blades disintegrated. Mr. Sid Shannon, VP Operations of EAL, witnessed that test.

My engineering training was a great help in the test work and actually saved my life a few times, as well as risking it. For example, the chief engineer of Kellett was working on the design of an experimental helicopter when I was nearing the end of the rooftop contract but I refused to test it the way it was designed and that saved my life because I opted to stay with Eastern. The experimental helicopter crashed fatally.

I flew the Air Mail between the roof and the airport for the year without accident. I checked out another pilot, John Lukens, to act as reserve pilot and he took flew for about