The descriptions of the radio beacons are as accurate as the writer can make them. The installation of these beacons marks a great step forward in the development of flying. Radio beacons are being erected as fast as possible along the entire transcontinental airway, and will also be used to guide befogged fliers on other routes. In the course of this story Jimmy Donnelly awakens a sleeping family whose home was afire, by diving at the house and making as much noise with his plane as possible. On various occasions Air Mail pilots have done exactly this thing. That excellent flier and former Air Mail pilot, Paul Collins, is one of the airmen who performed this trick. Covering floods, scouting out the marooned and helpless, and making aerial surveys of districts suffering from great calamities, is a commonplace among news fliers. Time and again they have carried food and medicine and clothing, and even newspapers, to persons marooned in floods or on ice-blocked islands or on stranded ships. In this story Jimmy Donnelly transports the stereotype matrixes from a flooded newspaper office to another newspaper plant miles distant, where the stereotype plates are cast and the edition printed. This thing actually happened in the Middle West, when a flier took the “mats” of the Hutchinson (Kans.) _News and Herald_ to the plant of the Wichita _Eagle_, where the papers were printed and then rushed back by plane to Hutchinson for distribution in that city. Many of the incidents pictured in the chapter about the New Hampshire flood are actual occurrences. Incredible though it may seem, even the affair with the bootlegger, in which Jimmy Donnelly is forced to fly a rum runner to Canada, actually happened. Shirley Short, former Air Mail pilot and flier for the Chicago _Daily News_, told me the story. Hamilton Lee, piloting a plane for the Chicago _Tribune_, transported food to folks marooned on an island in Lake Michigan. A bootlegger, flying over the island at the same time, broke a connecting rod bearing and got down safely, although his engine was torn half out of his plane. He clapped a pistol to Lee’s head and forced Lee to carry him the rest of the way to the mainland. For the purpose of this story it was necessary to transfer the incident to Lake Ontario, but that does not alter the essential truthfulness of the tale. The fact is that almost everything in this book is based upon an actual occurrence, or was suggested to me by fliers as the result of their experiences. I mention this fact because, although this book is purely a piece of fiction, the purpose of the book is to show the part that fliers play in news coverage. Hence it had to be truthful in essence.