The classic international seaplane race had long been the Schneider Trophy and the admiral had set his heart on winning it. The expenditure of time, money, and effort could be justified then because it always stimulated technical progress. And so BUAERO created a new class of racers and brought the trophy to America; the admiral, master that he was of the art of publicity, played up the results to the fullest. The Navy had also entered the classic land-plane races using special racers in the “free-for-all pursuit.” Then, since turn about had always been fair play, the Army entered Jimmy Doolittle in the Schneider Cup seaplane races and won them hands down. This was the same Jimmy Doolittle who would one day take off in an Army bomber from the Navy carrier _Hornet_ in our first air raid on Tokyo. Meanwhile, the middle ’twenties were a free-swinging era of intense competition that pushed American aeronautics to the forefront of world progress. The bursting bubble of stock-market speculation in 1929 squeezed out the small fry, but the big boys went on for a while longer. Meanwhile I found my new flying ability most useful in my billet as Chief of Design. On a training-plane competition between Boeing and Huff-Daland, I was able to check the trial-board report myself and, being fresh out of Pensacola, to do so with a fair knowledge of the latest edition of the _Flight Manual_. The Boeing developed a characteristic which, until then, was new to us. Pete Mitscher, the same Pete who would one day command Task Force 58 in the Pacific and earn from his mates the reputation for being the ablest air commander of them all, got into a flat spin at 6,000 feet over Washington and windmilled to a crash on the end of Haines Point, where he stepped out of the damaged plane quite unharmed. Had he known about flat spins back in the days of the “Affair Fleet,” things would have been more difficult. Then one of these tests of mine came near to washing me out of aviation’s slipstream forever and leaving me as a part of the permanent “slip.” There had been some discussion in BUAERO of a suggestion to equip Pensacola with some advanced combat trainers by taking the Pratt and Whitney Wasp out of the Curtiss Hawk and substituting in it the lower-power Wright Whirlwind. I had argued against this and suggested obtaining the same result by flying the standard Hawks with partly open throttles. And in order to prove the efficacy of this, I went over to the Naval Air Station, Anacostia, where we did our flight testing, to put on a demonstration. When I waddled out in my flying suit and parachute, I found the plane turning up on the line, but the mechanic was dissatisfied with the way the engine was running. It was one hundred revs short of the full-throttle crank speed. Since this might be due to a weak spark plug or some other minor fault and since I intended to fly at half throttle anyway, I got in, taxied out onto the field, and took off.