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.  She was a fine machine, too, as machines went in those days.  To-day it is no exaggeration to say that ten thousand feet above the earth is low to a flier.  Everyone goes to twenty thousand continually, and many of the biggest fights take place from seventeen thousand to twenty thousand feet up.

“The character of the work we have to do has changed as much as the machines have changed.  First, anti-aircraft guns—–­’Archies,’ we call them—–­have improved enormously.  In the first of the show the airman merely had to keep five thousand feet up and no Archie could touch him.  A French friend of mine told me the other day that one of their anti-aircraft guns hit a flier at a height of fifteen thousand feet.  The gun was firing from an even greater distance than that across country, too.  The very fact that flying at considerable height protected aircraft when scouting produced scientific methods into the collection of information.

“The camera work that has been evolved in this war is little short of wonderful.  When it was realized that the planes could get photographs from a height that was out of reach of the Archies of those days, fighting one aeroplane with another came next.  Fights in the air, instead of being rare, became the daily routine.  I doubt if any of the planes that began the war game in 1914 were armed with rapid-fire guns.  The aviators carried automatic pistols or rifles.  Some carried ordinary service revolvers.

“With the introduction of the actual air fighting as a part of the scheme of things, three distinct jobs were developed.  First, the reconnaissances, which the scouts had to make daily.  Next, the artillery observers, whose work it was to direct our gun-fire.  Next, the fighters, pure and simple.  Another job was bombing, but we have not had as much of that as of the other branches of the work.