Ely rose from the Presidio parade grounds, flew out over the bay, hovered above the ship for an instant, and then swooped down, cutting off his power and running lightly up the platform, when the drag of the sand bags brought him to a stop exactly in the centre, probably one of the greatest feats in accurate landing ever performed by an aviator. As I have said, the platform was only four feet wider than the planes of the Curtiss biplane that Ely used, yet the photograph taken from the fighting top of the ship shows the machine touching the platform squarely in the centre. When one stops to think that the aeroplane was travelling about forty miles an hour when it touched the deck and was brought to a stop within a hundred feet, the remarkable precision of the aviator will be appreciated. Not only was there not the least mishap to himself or to the machine in landing, but as soon as he had received a few of the many excited congratulations awaiting him, he started off again and flew back the ten miles to the camp of the 30th Infantry on the Aviation Field, where wild cheers greeted the man and the machine that had for the first time linked the Army and the Navy. For this is what, in the wars of the future, or even in the preservation of the future's peace, the aeroplane is certainly going to do, joining as nothing else can the two branches of the service. I don't think there has ever been so remarkable a landing made with an aeroplane as Ely's, and probably never so much store put by the mere act of coming down in the right place. A few feet either way, a sudden puff of wind to lift the aeroplane when it should descend, or any one of a dozen other things, might have spelled disaster for the whole undertaking, deprived the daring aviator of a well earned success, and the world of a remarkable spectacular demonstration of practical aviation. On the day of the test I was in San Diego and awaited news from San Francisco with a good deal of impatience. When at last the Associated Press bulletin announced that Ely had landed without mishap I first felt a great relief that there had been no accident to mar the success of the thing, and then a sense of elation that we had taken another long step in the advancement of aviation. Early in January I went to Southern California to establish an experimental station, and at the same time to instruct the officers of the Army and Navy whom I had invited the War and Navy Departments to assign for that purpose. A part of our experiments were along the line of a new "amphibious" machine that had been on my mind ever since my first experiments in Hammondsport.