made, in June 1909, the first successful flight on an all-British aeroplane. Thereafter he made many flights; the earliest of these were short and low, earning him the name of 'Roe the Hopper', but before long he was making flights of three hundred yards in length at a height of from six to ten feet. One day in the summer of 1909 a young woman who had come down to commit suicide in the river Lea saw his machine skimming about and went home; then she wrote to Mr. Roe urging him to let her take his place as pilot and so save his life at the expense of hers. Mr. Roe very tactfully replied that he would gladly let her fly the machine when he had perfected it, thus offering her something to look forward to. But his chief troubles were with the local authorities, who employed a bailiff to watch him and prevent his flying. At Brooklands Mr. Roe had become accustomed to early rising, and it was some time before the bailiff caught him in the act of preparing to fly, but he was caught at last, and police-court proceedings were instituted. Just at that time Bleriot flew the Channel, and the case was dropped, so that the authorities were not called upon to decide whether flying is legal or illegal. As for Mr. Roe, he moved on to Wembley Park, where he flew with steadily increasing success. In 1910 he made an aviation partnership with his brother, who had prospered as a manufacturer of webbing in Manchester. In the same year he had his revenge on Brooklands, for the new manager, Major Lindsay Lloyd, saw the possibilities of aviation, and converted the centre of the track into an aerodrome. There the Roes were welcomed, and there they produced and flew their thirty-five horse-power tractor triplane. After a visit to America they settled down to their work and had their revenge on the War Office by producing the famous Avro machine, so named after its inventor. In its original form it was a tractor biplane with a Gnome engine of fifty horse-power, shortly afterwards increased to eighty horse-power. It became, and has remained, the standard training machine for the Royal Air Force. It is sufficiently stable, and yet sensitive, and can fly safely at high or low speeds. It set the fashion to the world in tractor biplanes. Mr. Roe had never believed in the front elevators of the early American and French aeroplanes, with the pilot sitting on the front edge of the plane, exposed to the air; nor in the tail held out by booms, as it is in the pusher machines, with the airscrews revolving between the body of the machine and the tail. For his perfected machine of 1913 he had the advice of experts and mathematicians, but the general design of the machine was his own, worked out by pure air-sense, or, in his own words, by 'eye and experience'. Early in 1914 the German Government bought an Avro seaplane, which soon after was the first heavier-than-air machine to make the voyage from the mainland to Heligoland. No machine designed in