Not too many pilots had qualified for deck landings back there in 1927. The _Langley_ could make only twelve knots, and her deck was so narrow a pilot could not see it behind the engine. He could barely see the signalman out on his platform, and even with a good landing, failures of the airplane or the arresting gear could make him trouble. We used Vought UO’s with arresting hooks hung under their tails to catch the crosswires, and cross-axle hooks, long since abandoned, to catch the fore and aft wires. Three of us constituted the next class. After three days of preliminary instruction on a simulated flight deck at Ream Field, primarily to familiarize us with the flag signals, we went aboard. On the way down the bay, a flock of sea gulls followed in our wake, beady eyes alight for possible garbage, and since they constituted a flight hazard, Emile Chourré, a veteran carrier pilot, perched aft on the signal platform to practice his antiaircraft marksmanship by working on the gulls with a BB gun. Outside Point Loma the first pilot off—a youngster who had been as hot as a firecracker at Ream Field—went haywire, and after washing out his landing gear was ordered back to the air station where he made a safe belly landing in a shower of sand while surrounded by crash trucks, fire engines, and ambulances. My place was second in the line and, as I scrambled into the cockpit and looked down into the nettings where the whole ship’s company had assembled in the hope of seeing a brass hat roll over the side, I thanked my stars that the one thing I could do well with an airplane was to set it gently back on the ground. And so closely did I concentrate on the business in hand that I lost track of my landings and came to only when Tiny Sullivan, a 300-pound chief and an old friend, shook hands with himself as I jolted aboard for the tenth and final landing. Climbing from the cockpit I thumbed my nose at Bobby Moulton and waddled triumphantly toward the disappointed sailormen in the nettings.