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There is just one answer it is a matter entirely of training. It might be said that the Canadian casualties on the Texas flying-fields near Fort Worth during the winter of 1917-18, when the Royal Air Force occupied two airdromes, were the cause of comment all over the country.
Late that night it had reached one of the huge airdromes, the vastness of which unfolded itself to the astonished gaze of the boys at daybreak of the morning after. They had not dreamed that such acres and acres of hangars existed along the whole front. The war in the air assumed new proportions to them. They were housed in huts, warm and dry, if not palatial.
"Well, Tom, how's your head now?" "How's my head? What do you mean? There's nothing the matter with my head," and the speaker, who wore the uniform of a French aviator, glanced up in surprise from the cot on which he was reclining in his tent near the airdromes that stretched around a great level field, not far from Paris. "Oh, isn't there?" questioned Jack Parmly, with a smile.
But in the battles of the Somme our airmen, at a heavy cost of life, kept the enemy down a while and blinded his eyes. The planting of new airdromes between Albert and Amiens, the long trail down the roads of lorries packed with wings and the furniture of aircraft factories, gave the hint, to those who had eyes to see, that in this direction a merry hell was being prepared.
But the targets were airdromes, military camps, arsenals and munitions camps not hospitals or kindergartens.
Even Jimmy knew enough about airdromes to recognize that. He waited a moment at the table to take in fully the momentous fact that their own little town was to be a center of activity with regard to aviation. Then he dashed out to spread the news among his schoolfellows. His particular chums were, like himself, boys whose homes were in the town.
Reference has been made to the extraordinary immunity of flying airplanes to the attacks of anti-aircraft guns. The number of wounds they could sustain without being brought to earth was amazing. Grahame-White tells of a comparison made in one of the airdromes of the wounds sustained by the machines after a day's hard scouting and fighting.
Almost immediately preparations for the route were worked out, twenty-five airdromes and landing-fields were designated, of which the main ones would be at Cairo and Basra on the Tigris, with subsidiary fields at Marseilles, Pisa, or Rome, Taranto, Sollum, Bushire, Damascus, Bagdad, Bander Abbas, Karachi, Hyderabad, and Jodhpur.
Shortly after the Royal Air Force returned to its airdromes in Canada in the middle of April the Gosport system of flying training, which had been used successfully in England, was begun on the Curtiss J.N. 4B-type training-plane. The result was an immediate and material decrease in fatal accidents.
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