Towards the end of April Captain H. R. M. Brooke-Popham took over from Captain Fulton the command of the old aeroplane company on Salisbury Plain, and on the 13th of May, when the Royal Flying Corps was formed, this company became No. 3 Squadron of the new formation. No. 2 Squadron was formed from the nucleus of aeroplane pilots at Farnborough, and was placed under the command of Captain C. J. Burke. In August the Central Flying School was started at Upavon, with Captain Godfrey Paine, R.N., as commandant. The airship company at Farnborough, being lineally descended from the old balloon school, became No. 1 Squadron of the Royal Flying Corps Military Wing. The command of this squadron was given to one of the earliest of aeronautical pioneers, Captain E. M. Maitland, who, almost alone among the pioneers, preferred the airship to the aeroplane. Edward Maitland Maitland, after being educated at Haileybury and Trinity College, Cambridge, joined the Essex Regiment as a second lieutenant in 1900. He served in the South African War, and in the spring of 1908 turned his attention to ballooning. On the 18th of November in that year, along with Mr. C. C. Turner and the late Professor A. E. Gaudron, he ascended from the Crystal Palace in the _Mammoth_, a balloon of more than a hundred thousand cubic feet in capacity, supplied by the enterprise of the _Daily Graphic_, and travelled in the air to Mateki Derevni in Russia, a distance of 1,117 miles, which was traversed in thirty-six and a half hours. His main interest was not in Russia, but in the air, and he returned to England at once. When in 1919 he accompanied the airship R 34 on the first famous air voyage across the Atlantic, he remained in America for only a few hours. During the years 1909 and 1910 he was attached to the balloon school at Farnborough, and carried out aeroplane experiments at his own costs. He piloted a Voisin biplane in 1909 at the Doncaster meeting, which, because it started the day before the Blackpool meeting, may be called the first flying meeting in England.