San Diego was brought to my attention as affording every advantage for experimental work in aviation. A study of the weather bureau records here showed a minimum of wind and a maximum of sunshine the year round. I visited that city in January, 1911, and after a thorough inspection of the grounds offered as an aviation field, decided to make that city the headquarters for the winter and to carry on the experimental and instructional work there. North Island, lying in San Diego Bay, a mile across from the city, was turned over to me by its owners, the Spreckels Company. It is a flat, sandy island, about four miles long and two miles wide, with a number of good fields for land flights. The beaches on both the ocean and bay sides are good, affording level stretches for starting or landing an aeroplane. Besides, the beaches were necessary to the water experiments I wished to make. North Island is uninhabited except by hundreds of jack rabbits, cottontails, snipe, and quail. It joins Coronado Island by a narrow sand spit on the south side, which is often washed by the high tides. Otherwise the two islands are separated by a strip of shallow water a mile long and a couple of hundred yards wide, called Spanish Bight. Thus the island on which we were to do our experimenting and training was accessible only by boat and it was a comparatively easy matter to exclude the curious visitor whenever we desired to do so. There was no particular reason for excluding the public other than the desire to work unhampered by crowds, which is always a distracting influence. In the meantime Lieutenant Theodore G. Ellyson of the submarine service, then stationed at Newport News, Virginia, had been detailed by the Navy Department to report to me in California for instruction in aviation. He had joined me in Los Angeles, where, though there are all the climatic requirements, and good fields for practice flights, the ideal body of smooth water for experiments on that element was lacking. The War Department responded later, instructing General Bliss, commanding the Department of California at San Francisco, to detail as many officers as could be spared to go to San Diego for instruction in the art of flying. There was much eagerness among the officers of the Department of California and I was informed that some thirty applications were made for the detail. Lieutenant (now Captain) Paul W. Beck, of the Signal Corps, located at the Presidio, San Francisco, and Lieutenant John C. Walker, Jr., of the 8th Infantry, Monterey, Cal., were named at once, and later Lieutenant C. E. M. Kelly, 30th Infantry, San Francisco, was added to the Army's representation. This made a list of four officers, three from the Army and one from the Navy, and with these I began work. In February, however, the Navy Department designated Ensign Charles Pousland of the destroyer Preble, at San Diego, to join Lieutenant Ellyson as a Navy pupil in aviation.