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"Only I bargain that you take me all the way up the Nile to look at the pyramids and the ruined temples!" "Very well, if you'll undertake to dig out the Nile's basin so as to accommodate a vessel of six thousands tons!" laughed the captain. "Otherwise I shall have to arrange to take you in a sea-plane!" "And we'd fly over the desert? Oh, that would be thrillsome!
The British sea-plane, although still in an empirical stage, like everything else in this sphere of warlike operations, has reached a point of progress in advance of anything attained elsewhere.
She had told the Examiner reporter who had caught her as she stood beside a naval sea-plane, that she "loved" flying and loved taking a chance and that her worst trouble was with nose-bleed, which she'd get over in time, she felt sure. And if the Texas flight was a success she would try to arrange for a flight down to the Canal at the same time that the Pacific fleet comes through from Colon.
The risk which the British sea planes underwent was great, but there seems to have been no hesitation on the part of the aviators to fly to the attack. Early in the morning of March 25, 1916, two sea-plane "mother ships," accompanied by a squadron of eight protected cruisers and fast destroyers under the command of Commodore Tyrwhitt, started from the east coast of England.
Billings was satisfied, as were the rest of us, that this was the beach mentioned by Bowen, and we further found that there was ample room to assemble the sea-plane. Billings, having arrived at a decision, lost no time in acting, with the result that before mid-afternoon we had landed all the large boxes marked "H" upon the beach, and were busily engaged in opening them.
That same buzz came irritatingly to the ears of a none-too-sprucely dressed young man who lay, with eyes shut, under the shifting shade of a giant palm, a hundred yards away. He had not caught the phrase which inspired the applause thanks to the confusion of street sounds and the multiple dry rattle of the palm-fronds and the whirring passage of a sea-plane which circled above park and bay.
The British engine of reliable make had not yet been evolved, and the aeroplane generally was a conglomerate affair made up of parts assembled from various parts of the Continent. The present-day sea-plane was yet to come, and naval pilots shared the land-going aeroplanes of their military brethren.
These stations are at Calshot, on Southampton Water, the Isle of Grain, off Sheerness, Leven, on the Firth of Forth, Cromarty, Yarmouth, Blythe, and Cleethorpes. But what is even more important is the fact that the Government is encouraging sea-plane constructors to go ahead as fast as they can in the production of efficient machines. Messrs.
Toward midday a sea-plane which had been releasing depth-bombs and hovering eagerly above the wide iridescent and spreading stain, sheered shoreward and shot along the coast. There was a dead man afloat in a cave, rocking there rather peacefully in his life-suit or at least they supposed him to be dead.
The British ships remained off the coast for three hours in order to pick up the returning airmen, and during this time they were attacked by dirigibles and submarines, without, however, suffering damage. Six of the sea-planes returned safely to the ships, but one was wrecked in Heligoland Bight. But the present efficient sea-plane is a development of the war.
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