The launch of No. 5 followed almost immediately, but taking warning by the supposed cause of failure of No. 4, its wings were set at a root angle of 20°, and a hurried adjustment was made to secure greater rigidity, the tip being partly secured against twisting by a light cross-piece, and guyed so that the wing as a whole was not only at a greater angle, but stiffer than in the case of No. 4. These changes it was hoped would cause the aerodrome to advance at a considerable initial angle with the horizontal, and it did so, for instantly after the launch, as the aerodrome escaped from its bonds into free air, the inclination of the midrod increased until it stood at about 60°, when the machine, after struggling a moment to maintain itself, slid ‹backward› into the water (with its engines working at full speed) after advancing about 12 metres (39 feet), and remaining in the air about 3 seconds. On the whole, the result of the first actual trial of an aerodrome in the field was disconcerting, for unless the result was due to the wings being placed in a position wholly unfavorable to support, there seemed to be no doubt that either the engine power or the supporting surface was insufficient. Now this engine power was by computation between three and four times what was necessary to support the aerodrome in horizontal flight at an angle of 20°, and after making every allowance for slip, there should have been still an excess of power for the first flight of No. 4, whereas actual trial indicated that it was insufficient. But on the other hand, the experiment with No. 5, which momentarily held its position in the air at an angle of 60°, seemed to indicate that the engine power was abundant, and that the failure must be traced to some other cause. As a result of these experiments it was concluded, “that it is an all-important thing that the angle of the front wing shall be correct, and that this cannot be calculated unless it is known how much the tip will turn up under pressure of the weight.” I felt, then, that I had learned something from the failures as to the need of greater rigidity of the wings, though how to obtain this without adding to their weight was a trying problem. It was thus at an early stage suspected that the evil to be guarded against in wing construction was the distortion of the form of the wing under pressure, chiefly by torsion, which is specially hard to provide against without a construction which is [p084] necessarily heavy. This suspicion was a correct one, though the full extent of the evil was not yet surmised. In the light of subsequent experiment it may now be confidently stated that the trouble was with the wings, which at the moment after launching were flexed wholly out of the shape which they were designed to have, and which they retained up to that critical moment.