First, engine construction is another
thing to-day. They can make engines in England now, though they were
a long time getting to the point where they could do it. I believe
that most all the best motor factories in England have learned to turn
out good flying engines by now. It means a lot of difference to
produce a machine that can do sixty miles an hour and one that can do
two miles a minute. Yet at the start mighty few aeroplanes could beat
sixty miles an hour, and to-day I can show you plenty of planes right
here in this 'drome which can do one hundred and twenty. If a plane
cannot do two miles a minute nowadays it is pretty sure to meet
something in enemy hands that can do so. Why, before long one hundred
and twenty may be too slow.
"Then look at altitudes! When I first thought of flying, five thousand
feet up was big. That was not so very long ago. Before the war some
very specially built machines, no good for general work, had been
coaxed up to about fifteen thousand feet by some crack airman, who
had worked for hours to do it, but the best machine we had at the
'drome where I learned flying would only do six thousand, and no one
could get her up there under forty minutes.
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