We know how well our airmen have learnt their lesson. Many of them have become competent pilots with astonishing rapidity. A writer in the _Daily Chronicle_ (October 13, 1916) has told how ‘the British Air Service is now a great army, 80 per cent. of whom, before the war, had never even seen an aeroplane, much less been up in one—bank clerks, young merchants, undergrads., doctors, lawyers, journalists, all endowed with two sterling qualities required by the pilot of the air, courage and levelheadedness.’ And how has this great miracle been accomplished? August, 1914, found us lamentably short of both personnel and material, but what little there was, was of the very best. The already experienced pilots set to work with a will upon the more than generous quantity of raw material that came to hand. Within a few months their influence made itself felt. ‘They taught the _quirks_—the airmen’s pet name for the novice—in their own simple and undemonstrative manner, that the air is to be respected but never feared, the aeroplane treated as a being of life and animation, with quaint humours peculiarly its own, and not as a lifeless mass of metal and woodwork.’ The usual method of training a new hand is to get him used to the air. The beginner is taken up for several flights as a passenger. In the initial flight the pilot will perform the most daring manœuvres and precipitous turns, watching his passenger closely the whole time for any signs of nervousness or fear. It is a most trying ordeal that first trip up aloft, and the bravest hearts have been known to quail.