been remarkably free from serious accidents even though now he pitches straight down from the sky, seeming to fall straight to the earth and just catching his machine up in time to avoid striking the earth. At Hammondsport on July 29th, 1912, Beachey was trying out a new model military type and he ascended six thousand five hundred feet in fifteen minutes, while he came down in one minute, making one of his perpendicular dives with the engine still. The whistling of the wind through the taut wires of the machine could be heard half a mile away. On this occasion one of the lady visitors to the testing grounds, who had never seen Beachey fly before, thinking that he was falling and would surely strike the ground and be dashed to pieces, fainted. Beachey said, "Flying did not come to me at first but it seemed to come all of a sudden and then it came big."[10] Once Beachey had to land in a very small place surrounded with trees and the only way he could do it with the fast machine that he was driving was to kill its speed in the air by skimming over the trees, shutting off his motor, and gliding along to the place where he wanted to stop, and then pointing the machine up suddenly, very much as a bird comes to a stop, and then "pancaking" down, as it is called when you come down "kerflop" like a pancake. Beachey broke a wheel by this performance and he has worried over that little breakage as much as another man would over smashing up a whole machine. Beachey flew from New York to Philadelphia in company with Eugene Ely and Hugh Robinson in August, 1911, winning the first inter-city race to be held in the United States. Among the skilled operators of hydroaeroplanes is Mr. Hugh Robinson who flew down the Mississippi River in the spring of 1912, carrying mail and covering the river course between Minneapolis, Minn., and Rock Island, Ill. Mr. Robinson also went to France in May of 1912, and competed in the first contests and races ever held in this new sport at Monte Carlo. Since his return to America, Mr. Robinson has been the instructor in hydroaeroplaning at Hammondsport. CHAPTER II A DESCRIPTION OF THE CURTISS BIPLANE