Of course, the present high landing speed of an aeroplane is the cause of many accidents. Thirty-five miles an hour, except where the head resistance is great, is the slowest speed now made in landing a heavier-than-air machine. The invention of a device or the discovery of a means of reducing the speed to ten miles an hour when touching the ground, though still only in the realms of the probable, is by no means diametrically opposed to the inherent laws of the aeroplane. This accomplished, the danger of flying in an aeroplane will be reduced to infinitesimal proportions—at least to a degree no more precarious than riding in an automobile. Already the War Department has ordered flyers to map the country, and large stretches of the United States have already been mapped. The Wilson Aerial Highway, from New York to Chicago and San Francisco, has been laid out. Aerial transportation companies have been formed to provide planes. Thousands of skilled pilots have secured jobs; many chambers of commerce have built landing-places near their towns and cities. Needless to say, aerial laws will be passed to prevent stunting with passengers and requiring machines to fly at the altitude necessary to glide to the nearest aerodrome in case a motor stalls. Already a dozen different aeronautical motors have been developed which will run twenty-four to one hundred hours without stopping. Recently the Caproni biplane at Mineola, Long Island, climbed to 14,000 feet with one of the three motors completely shut off all the way. On August 9 the Italian poet Gabriele d’Annunzio flew from Venice to Vienna via the Alps with his motor wide open all the way. Indeed, thousands of equally sensational flights have been made, in all kinds of weather and under the most adverse circumstances of a great war. Of the hundred-odd air raids on London by the Gothas some were conducted in broad daylight, when the Germans had to fly through squadrons of British scouts and fighters, through or over three barrages in order to get to the metropolis; and yet seldom more than one or two Hun machines out of the thirty usually constituting the squadron were forced to land or were shot down. The same thing was true of the British Independent Air Force in the raids they made over the German cities, citadels, factories, ammunition-dumps, and other military objectives, though they often flew in fleets of fifty to a hundred.