It is time for the pupil to go up for his solo spin under the plan adopted for army purposes. Up, up, up the pupil flies, three thousand feet, and the ground below looks soft and green. Would it be soft to hit in a spin from that height? It would not. Have people ever spun that far? he wonders. They have. Have machines ever failed to come out of a spin and killed the pilot? The answer is too obvious. With faith in nothing in particular, and with his mind made up that one can die but once in a spin, he stalls and spins her--and comes out. He is so surprised and exhilarated that he tries it again before he loses his nerve. Yet again. The pupil is a pilot, the air has no terrors, and he has learned the oldest truth of flying, that there is nothing to a spin unless you don't come out. The natural result of training a pupil along those lines is that he graduates rapidly into a good stunting pilot. He realizes that he cannot tempt the devil at three hundred feet and hope to live, but he takes a good altitude, throws his machine upside down, and knows that, given enough air, he must come out. He does come out unless he loses complete control of his mind and body. With fifteen hours of solo flying the pupil has really become a pilot. He is beginning to show that he can control his machine. From then on it is a question of the polishing of the nice points, making his forced landings perfect, not side-slipping a foot on his vertical banks, and coming out of spin so that he always faces the airdrome--all of which distinguish the good pilot from the poor pilot. IV SAFETY IN FLYING The fatalities on the training-fields of every country during the period of training in war, and before and after the war, testify only too surely that flying cannot be absolutely safe. It is no reflection on the future of flying to realize that it has not been safe, and that it can never, perhaps, be made fool-proof. One or two things must be remembered before we become despondent over the future safety of flying. When the United States entered the war the entire personnel of the Signal Corps numbered one hundred and sixty officers and men. At the time the armistice was signed more than thirty thousand pilots had been trained. They were trained in great numbers under high pressure. We did not have the machines to train them in or the instructors to fly with them. We had not the experience in wholesale training of flying-men, and yet we turned out vast numbers. It was a question of getting the men through their flying and getting them overseas as quickly as possible. We had no adequate methods of inspection of machines, and no laid-out course in flying-training. We had to learn by our own experience, in spite of the fact that England at all times gave unstinted aid.