The Aerodrome by Rex Warner

Author:Rex Warner [Warner, Rex]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Dystopian, Fascists, Fiction
ISBN: 9780099511564
Publisher: Random House UK
Published: 1941-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

Alterations

THIS WAS BUT one of many lectures which we heard on a variety of subjects; for in additition to instruction in flying, engineering, and aerodynamics we were given classes in natural history, mathematics, economics, history, and philosophy. We studied the whole theory of flight in very great detail, spending, I remember, more than a month in an examination of the wing of an albatross, and many days in learning about bats, flying squirrels, and other animals whose destiny it had been to attempt, however feebly, some mastery over the air. And this part of our training was to me at least as interesting and exciting as was the actual flying, although I was myself a better pilot than a philosopher, and became indeed for some time rather ridiculously proud of my ability in this respect. I had done my first solo some days before anyone else in my class, and I remember now the thrill of it as being no anticipation of danger but rather a delicious sense of confidence. At the moments of taking off and of landing I had felt much the same feeling as a footballer has from time to time, when he sees instantaneously a gap in the defence and his own ability to break through it. Indeed the footballer's confidence and exhilaration is, I believe, more intense, for in an open field where thirty players are competing there are more possible permutations, and much more of the surprising and the accidental than there is about the controls of an aircraft. Yet at the time when I was learning to fly there was still a certain romance attached to the handling of these machines, a relic perhaps from the past when the ground staffs of aerodromes were less perfectly organized, and when many of the instruments which we now use had not even been thought of. I used to listen with a kind of regret to the stories told to us by our instructor, a one-eyed sergeant-pilot, who was old enough to be the father of any of us, and who had been flying since he was sixteen. He would tell us of crashes caused by faulty construction that today would be impossible; of fights with storm and snow of which the pilot had not been forewarned; of how it had even been necessary to employ strength in handling the controls. He would look at us somewhat sadly from his one eye and say: "A kite used to take some flying in those days", and then appear the slightest bit embarrassed by what he had said, as though his remark might be misconstrued into a criticism of modern flying. And indeed, although no one voluntarily rushes into danger, we would still envy him for the hazards through which he had successfully come and of which we would have little or no experience. For whatever we attempted in the air we could be certain at all times that our machines would respond with absolute accuracy to the

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