Though tail-spins could be avoided without use of “blinkers,” by carefully observing the little piece of string that indicated side slip, yet they sometimes occurred. In one flight, in September, 1905, when the “blinkers” were not on the machine, Orville suddenly discovered he was in a tail-spin and that he was about to come down in the top of a forty-foot thorn tree. The thorns were several inches long, and the idea of falling through them to the ground was not alluring. Orville quickly turned the machine into an almost vertical dive while turning in a circle 50 to 100 feet in diameter. The inner wing of the machine hit a branch of the tree, imbedding a thorn in an upright, and tore off the branch. In the dive, the higher wing, because of much greater speed, soon passed the lower wing in the downward plunge and itself became the low wing. The machine thus was in a steep bank with the high side toward the tree, just the opposite from what it had been before. When Orville turned the elevator to avoid striking the ground, the machine turned suddenly and unexpectedly away from the tree, because, in this steeply banked condition, the elevator exerted more pressure laterally than it did vertically. (When an aeroplane is banked to 45 degrees the elevator serves just as much for a rudder as for an elevator, and the rudder just as much for an elevator as for a rudder.) Though the machine lightly touched the ground, Orville flew it on back to the hangar, where the branch of the tree was found still clinging to the upright. It had been the practice of the Wrights to dive the machine to recover speed in a stall; but this quick recovery was from an entirely different cause--the great difference in the speeds of the two wings. An amusing flight by Orville in 1905 was made after some weeks of inactivity in flying and after the machine had undergone a number of changes since his last flight. When the machine left the starting rail it began pitching like a bucking broncho. Orville wanted to stop, but at every plunge the plane came down so steeply he did not dare attempt a landing. As soon as he got control of the machine, after going three or four hundred feet, he did land safely. Wilbur rushed up to inquire why he had stopped just when he had really got going. Orville explained that he would have landed even sooner, but had taken the first opportunity to stop without smashing the machine to pieces. Though the rudder and wing-warp were entirely independent of each other in all the flights of 1905, the Wrights several years later resumed having the two controls interconnected, to operate together, but with an arrangement needed for modifying their relationship when making turns.