Orville Wright, the pioneer of flying, was not in the best of health, but was devoting his entire time to experimental work in Dayton. Willard, who had designed the L. W. F. airplane and was then with the Aeromarine Co.; Chas. Day, formerly with the Sloane Manufacturing Co., and then with the Standard Aero Corporation; Starling Burgess, with the Burgess Co., of Marblehead, Mass.; Grover C. Loening, of the Sturtevant Co.; and D. D. Thomas, with the Thomas-Morse Co., were all aviation engineers on whom we could call. One of the best experts of this sort in the country was Lieut. Commander Hunsaker, of the Navy. In the Signal Corps we had Capt. V. E. Clark, who was also an expert in aviation construction, and he had several able assistants under him. The Burgess factory at Marblehead, the Aeromarine plants at Nutley and Keyport, N. J., and the Boeing Airplane Co. at Seattle were to work exclusively for the Navy, according to the mutual agreement, taking their aeronautical engineers with them. This gave the Army the engineering resources of the Curtiss, Dayton-Wright, and Thomas-Morse companies. Quite early we decided to give precedence in this country to the observation type of service plane, eliminating the single-place fighter altogether and following the observation planes as soon as possible with production of two-place fighting machines. This decision was based on the fact, not always generally remembered, that the primary purpose of war flying is observation. The duels in the air that occurred in large numbers, especially during the earlier stages of the war, were primarily to protect the observation machines or to prevent observation by enemy machines. The first service plane which we put into production and which proved to be the main reliance of our service-plane program was the De Haviland-4, which is an observation two-place airplane propelled by a Liberty 12-cylinder engine. As soon as the Bolling mission began to recommend types of service machines, it sent samples of the planes thus recommended. The sample De Haviland was received in New York on July 18, 1917. After it had been studied by various officers it was sent to Dayton. It had reached us without engine, guns, armament, or many other accessories later recommended as essential to a fighting machine. Before we could begin any duplication the plane had to be redesigned to take our machine guns, our instruments, and our other accessories, as well as our Liberty engine. The preliminary designing was complete, and the first American-built De Haviland model was ready to fly on October 29, 1917.