[2] This chapter was written before the outbreak of the great war, and was intended as a forecast of aerial warfare say five or ten years hence. At the present time, seeing that gun-carrying and bomb-dropping machines are still purely experimental, it is as flying scouts, and not as instruments of destruction, that aircraft are doing their vital work. CHAPTER XVI AT A MODERN AERODROME The workshops--Some problems of construction--The building of a wing--Aeroplane races--The Aerial Derby--Passenger flights. The first flying grounds were merely open tracts of land, chosen more or less haphazard, and offering no more than a smooth landing-point and an absence of treacherous gusts. But as flying developed, men came together with their machines, and groups of sheds were built. Then pupils arrived to learn to fly, and gradually an organisation was evolved. From a single rough shelter, perched perhaps at the brink of some stretch of waste land, pilots found themselves promoted to a row of neatly-built sheds, with a workshop attached to them in which aeroplanes might be built or repaired. And from this stage, not being contented with what could be found in the way of natural flying grounds, men uprooted trees, filled up ditches and hollows, erected fences, barriers, and gates, and created what we know as the modern aerodrome--a centre, that is to say, where machines are designed, constructed, and flown, where there are regular schools for pupils and apprentices, and to and from which the airmen pass when making cross-country flights. Public interest has also aided the growth of aerodromes; people are eager to see aeroplanes fly, and will come in thousands to an air meeting. So, as at the London Aerodrome, Hendon, there are public enclosures and pavilions, in addition to the buildings concerned solely with flight; and flying races and other contests are arranged, in which the pilots at the aerodrome, as well as those who come from other grounds, meet each other in friendly rivalry.