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When we examine carefully the statistics dealing with fatal accidents in aeroplanes we find that the pioneers of flying, such as the famous Wright Brothers, Bleriot, Farman, Grahame-White, and so on, were comparatively free from accidents. No doubt, in some cases, defective machines or treacherous wind gusts caused the craft to collapse in mid-air.
But at the risk of seeming too contented for anything I will assert I heard that noise no more than one hears the drone of an electric ventilator upon one's table. It was only when I came to speak to Mr. Grahame-White, or he to me, that I discovered that our voices had become almost infinitesimally small.
Grahame-White admirably expresses this when he says: "It is a melancholy reflection, when one is going through the lists of aeroplane fatalities, to think how many might have been avoided.
Grahame-White and several other officials of the London Aerodrome carried him shoulder high from his machine. From this time we hear little of Mr.
He became very friendly with Hank Odell; helped him repair his broken machine, went with him to vaudeville, or stood with him before the hangar, watching the automobile parties of pretty girls with lordly chaperons that came to call on Grahame-White and Drexel. "Some heart-winners, them guys, but I back my boss against them and ev'body else, Hank," Martin would say.
Cody and Grahame-White and eight of his air men left Hendon an hour ago to reconnoitre the south coast. Admiral Beatty has started with the Channel Squadron to head off the German convoy in the North Sea, and the torpedo destroyers have been sent to lie outside of Heligoland. We'll get that back by daylight. And on land every one of the three services is under arms.
Grahame-White was as steady as a motor-car running on asphalt. Then we went on from those anticipations of swaying insecurity to speculations about the psychological and physiological effects of flying. Most people who look down from the top of a cliff or high tower feel some slight qualms of dread, many feel a quite sickening dread.
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.
I have the same feeling when I see Count Zeppelin with his airship, or Grahame-White at Hendon, riding his vast cosmic pigeon up the sky; and it is the same feeling I have with the locomotives those unconscious, forbidding, coldly obedient terrible fellows!
The first L10,000 prize was offered in November, 1906, for a flight by aeroplane from London to Manchester in twenty-four hours, with not more than two stoppages en route. In 1910 two competitors entered the lists for the flight; one, an Englishman, Mr. Claude Grahame-White; the other, a Frenchman, M. Paulhan. Mr.
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