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I will not give an account of the trials by means of which one's ability as a combat pilot is most severely tested. This belongs among the pages of a textbook rather than in those of a journal of this kind. But to us who were to undergo the ordeal, for it is an ordeal for the untried pilot, our typewritten notes on acrobacy read like the pages of a fascinating romance.
As for their good shots, they are often so very good that we are forced into acrobacy of a wholly individual kind. Our avions have received many scars from their shells.
It will be necessary to pass rapidly over the period between the day when we received our brevets militaires and that upon which we started for the front. The event which bulked largest to us was, of course, the departure on active service. Preceding it, and next in importance, was the last phase of our training and the culmination of it all, at the School of Acrobacy.
And now the Nieuport has been surpassed, and almost entirely supplanted, by the Spad of 140, 180, 200, and 230 horse-power, and we have transferred our allegiance to each in turn, marveling at the genius of the French in motor and aircraft construction. At last we were ready for acrobacy.
He granted it gladly, and insisted upon giving me double the amount which I required. I promised to go back some day for a visit. First I will do acrobacy over the church steeple, and then, if the cows are not in the pasture, I am going to land, comme une fleur, as we airmen say, on that hill. It is mid-January, snowing, blowing, the thermometer below zero. We have done no flying for five days.
Accidents and fatalities were most frequent at the school of acrobacy, for the reason that one could not know, beforehand, whether he would be able to keep his head, with the earth gone mad, spinning like a top, standing on one rim, turning upside down. In the end we all mastered it after a fashion, for the tests are by no means so difficult of accomplishment as they appear to be.
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