The young pilot has not, up to this point, had any experience on trips, and there is always a sense of adventure in starting out over unknown country with only a roller map to guide one and the gauges and controls, which need constant attention, to distract one from the reading of the chart. Then, too, it is the first time that the student has flown free and at a great height over the earth, and his sense of exultation at navigating at will the boundless sky causes him to imagine he is a real pilot. True it is that when the voyages and altitudes are over, and his examinations in aeronautical sciences passed, the student becomes officially a _pilote-aviateur_, and he can wear two little gold-woven wings on his collar to designate his capacity, and carry a winged propeller emblem on his arm, but he is not ready for the difficult work of the front, and before he has time to enjoy more than a few days' rest he is sent to a school of _perfectionnement_. There the real, serious and thorough training begins. Schools where the pilots are trained on the modern machines--_écoles de perfectionnement_ as they are called--are usually an annex to the centres where the soldiers are taught to fly, though there are one or two camps that are devoted exclusively to giving advanced instruction to aviators who are to fly the _avions de chasse_, or fighting machines. When the aviator enters one of these schools he is a breveted pilot, and he is allowed a little more freedom than he enjoyed during the time he was learning to fly. He now takes up the Morane monoplane. It is interesting to note that the German Fokker is practically a copy of this machine. After flying for a while on a low-powered Morane and having mastered the landing, the pilot is put on a new, higher-powered model of the same make. He has a good many hours of flying, but his trips are very short, for the whole idea is to familiarize one with the method of landing. The Blériot has a landing gear that is elastic in action, and it is easy to bring to earth. The Nieuport and other makes of small, fast machines for which the pilot is training have a solid wheel base, and good landings are much more difficult to make. The Morane pilot has the same practices climbing to small altitudes around eight thousand feet and picking his landing from that height with motor off. When he becomes proficient in flying the single- and double-plane types he leaves the school for another, where shooting with machine guns is taught. This course in shooting familiarizes one with various makes of machine guns used on airplanes, and one learns to shoot at targets from the air. After two or three weeks the pilot is sent to another school of combat. TRICK FLYING AND DOING STUNTS