Jimmy
Hill was sent up on his first practice flight on an English machine.
Joe Little got his chance at the end of a week. He was sent up one
morning in a late-type bombing machine, a huge three-seated biplane
with great spreading wings and a powerful engine. This was a most
formidable looking machine in which one passenger sat out in front
mounted in a sort of machine-gun turret. The big biplane was fast,
in spite of the heavy armament it carried, its three passengers and
its arrangement for carrying hundreds of pounds of bombs as well.
Harry Corwin was in the air at the same time on an artillery machine,
the car or fuselage of which projected far in front of the two planes.
There, well in front of the pilot, the observer sat in a turret with
a machine-gun. Machine-guns were also mounted on the wings, and a
second passenger rode in the tail with another rapid-fire gun.
As Bob Haines had been on a rather long flight that day on a Nieuport,
a fast French biplane, and his observer had told Bob of a new French
dreadnought machine carrying two machine gunners and five machine-guns,
the boys talked armament long into the night.
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