From Paris I started by an English service for London. We started with an air of tremendous punctuality and efficiency from the Hôtel Crillon at three in the afternoon. I reckoned we should be up by 3.30, and that I should dine in London at half-past seven or eight. But we muddled about at the aerodrome of Le Bourget until nearly five, booking luggage, fooling with passports, packing the all too big and clumsy omnibus machine. I sat in a seat with a lot of valises and hat boxes, tied precariously with string, swaying in front of my nose. The saloon had a worn and weary look; it was not nearly so pretty as it is in the advertisement pictures. We made a fairly good flight to the coast except that now and then the engine popped a little. We rose over the water, as usual, to about five thousand feet. Then as we came within distant sight of Dungeness, one engine began to miss badly. I noticed that we were dropping rapidly. However, we escaped a ducking. We crossed the coast-line while still at nearly two thousand feet and landed at Lympne. Apologies. The defective engine, we were told, was in a hopeless condition, and the company must send us passengers on in cars to a rural railway station and so by slow train to London, to arrive at heaven knows what hour. There was no attempt whatever to bring up a reserve aeroplane from Croydon; I presume because the company has no reserve aeroplanes available. I had the good luck to find a friend at Lympne who took me to his house for the night and turned my misfortune into pleasure, but my fellow-passengers were not so fortunate. Luckily I was not a passenger in the French Goliath which crashed at West Malling in August last. I have flown successfully on one occasion from Paris to London in a French Goliath, and on another have started from London to Paris and had a forced landing at Lympne. These Goliaths are quite good machines, but they seem to be unlucky ones. That West Malling disaster was only another such story of “private enterprise” flying as I have told, but carried to the pitch of tragedy. The unfortunate machine must have been in a shocking condition of maladjustment. It had already been down at Lympne for patching, and was going on to Croydon. The radiator of the port engine had been leaking. Then as it went on to Croydon the starboard engine failed completely. But we have always been told, perhaps untruthfully, that even if one engine of these double engine machines fails the other suffices to carry on to a safe landing. The port engine was still going. The aviator declared at first that there was a panic among the passengers, and that is why he crashed in a nut plantation. I doubt about the panic. But at any rate, here again was a machine in use in a condition quite unfit for passenger traffic, so that it needed only a momentary nervous failure to destroy it.