CHAPTER X

SAFETY AND DANGER

Far above Hal Dane, Raynor's airplane shot into a fantastic rolling and twisting and turning, falling like a withered leaf, springing to life and hurling upward, stalling at wrong angles, behaving like some crazed thing of the skies.

Then Raynor volplaned to a beautiful landing, taxied across the turf, got out and strolled over to Hal.

"Now you go up and take a try at that," he ordered.

"Umph--I mean, sir--oh, sure!" muttered Hal, backing off a little and looking amazed. Had the careful, conservative Raynor gone out of his head?

"I mean it," said Raynor. Then his eyes began to twinkle. "It's all in the course. Only you're not to do it all by yourself the first few dozen times. You'll go up with me till you get the hang of it from watching."

Signaling for mechanics to take charge of his ship to give it the regular cleaning and overhauling after flights, he led the way towards the hangars for another machine.

As they walked, Raynor launched into his explanation.

"If a man wants to fly conservatively, he's first got to learn to stunt. May sound crazy, but it's a tested truth. It's a known fact now that a fourth of all the real crashes happen because a fellow got into a tail spin and didn't know how to get out of it. And the pilots in these crashes are mostly the youngsters, not the veterans. When a flyer has lived long enough with aviation to be considered a veteran, he usually knows by instinct what to do in a spin, doesn't have to stop and think 'What button shall I push?'

"Aviation school has caught the idea now that it's a pretty good thing to send a pupil up with an old-timer who can put a bus into spins and take it out of spins. If the pupil watches close enough, he automatically learns the movements. It's the latest aviation insurance against a crash!"

A plane had been rolled out and warmed up. They climbed in. Raynor ran quick fingers along the straps that bound them both to their seats, making certain that all was secure, then he gave the word for the blocks to be knocked away from in front of the machine.

With a roar of the motor they were off, speeding up at an angle that soon had them a thousand feet above earth.

Hal Dane felt a catch of pure excitement in his breath. This was going to be different from any flying he had ever known. Heretofore it had been "keep up speed, avoid stalls, and thus avoid the fatal spin." Now Raynor was deliberately taking him into the danger of stall and spin! Raynor was deliberately taking him into the dangers he might incur if fog, sleet or rain caught him, if unknown mountains loomed suddenly ahead, if storm winds hurled him out of balance.

They rode higher still; then the pilot suddenly shot sickeningly into the Chandelle, that zooming, sharply-banked turnabout.

He went into nose spins, and came out. Went into tail spins, and came out.

He took Hal through side-drifts and grapevines and the fluttering leaf, then righted the ship while one held the breath.

Raynor took the ship high again, then dived.

The next instant Hal was hanging by his middle from the safety belt, while the ship careened across the landscape absolutely upside down. Earth and sky swung round. To one hanging thus in dizzy space, the green earth suddenly looked crushingly hard.

The earth was coming up to meet them. It could not be three hundred--no, not two hundred feet distant. It was the end. Raynor had gone too far--lost control--he must have--

Hal steeled his nerves to try to meet the crash without a shriek.

But even while he held his breath to a sobbing gasp, the ship rolled over slowly and easily into normal flying position, and came to earth with all the grace of a perfect three-point landing.

The rolling earth ceased rolling. Hal Dane sat in a limp daze, like one come back from beyond a veiled, blank interim. Then his senses swept back to him.

So Raynor had known what he was about all the time. It was no accident. Knowingly he had gone into the back-dive and come out with the famous slow roll.

Two weeks after that Hal Dane was doing his own slow rolls, doing his spins and his Immelmanns. He practiced continually, with Raynor coaching him. High over a safe landing field, the pilot showed him all sorts of tricks and dodges, showed him how to extricate his ship from every conceivable position.

Here was carefulness in a new form. The Rand-Elwin School tried to look ahead, to foresee dangers, then to train its flyers to meet that danger capably.

Storm, fog, ice-weighted wings--these were natural adversities that aviators must circumvent as best they might.

But there was still one worse danger--the danger of carelessness.

The instructors strove to teach air-minded youngsters the arts of mechanical safety. In the air courses it was a cause for demerit, for expulsion from school even, for a pupil to fall into some mechanical danger that forethought could have avoided.

A horrible event impressed forever into Hal Dane's mind the penalty one paid for mechanical carelessness.

At mid-day, one of the students in advanced flying had gone up to give an exhibition in reverse controls, turns and spirals.

He was a marvelous flyer in spite of a certain bland recklessness that seemed to edge his every act. Now in the air he seemed to short-turn in his spirals, to be given to shooting into perilous climbs. He was that way in all his work, sliding through with a swagger carelessness. As he watched the pupil aviator now in the air, Hal's mind went back to events of that very morning, how the fellow had gone slipshod through the tiresome routine of overhauling the engine of the machine he was to use in the noon flight.

Some god of luck must ride that fellow's shoulder. For here he was up, flying a dirty motor that would have clogged on anybody else, yet gliding through dives and figure eights with the easy grace of a whirlwind.

A score of pupils and an instructor or two stood on the field below, heads bent back, watching the beautiful stalls and spins. Again he shot high into the air in a circling swoop. Then while everyone stared aloft, a little puff of flame darted out from the engine.

"It has back-fired--hot carbon showering from that dirty engine!" moaned Hal between white lips.

For a dazed second everyone stood paralyzed with horror while above them another flame shot out, darting towards the carburetor.

The next second the aviation field came alive. Rex Raynor leaped to a machine, a rope was hurled in after him, frenzied hands whirled the motor, shot the blocks from under the wheels.

Up into the sky with meteoric swiftness rose Raynor.

Below him, men stared upward, faces tensed with anguish as they watched his maneuvers. What could he do? What help could he be now?

With every moment it seemed that the burning plane must whirl downward and dash its lone occupant to death. Tongues of flame licked about it, reaching greedily for its vitals--the controls. The wings of the plane had been dipped in a fireproofing process, but now even these were smouldering.

Evidently the cockpit had become unbearable, for the watchers on the ground descried a figure creeping piteously out on a smoking wing stretch.

Charred bits began to float down. Raynor was circling in, shortening his wide spirals, dodging to the windward of flaming, floating particles.

Why didn't he hurry? Why didn't he swoop in--now? Ah-h-h, the agony of it! The doomed machine would be falling apart. It shot flaring through the skies like a bird of fire.

Crouched on its furthest wing tip rode the hapless young aviator, head bent away from the searing heat that was creeping out and out to him.