Excerpt: ...is God's. Render unto man his own flight and leave to the gulls their own. Man's flight is different because his destiny is different. He doesn't need the gulls' flight." But Bonny envied the gulls. He killed hundreds of them, yes, thousands, and buried them in the field. He built an airplane from what he thought he had learned from their dead bodies. He built an airplane and took it out to fly. Engineers, who had never studied gulls but who had studied man's flight, told him he shouldn't do it. They pointed out ...
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Excerpt: ...is God's. Render unto man his own flight and leave to the gulls their own. Man's flight is different because his destiny is different. He doesn't need the gulls' flight." But Bonny envied the gulls. He killed hundreds of them, yes, thousands, and buried them in the field. He built an airplane from what he thought he had learned from their dead bodies. He built an airplane and took it out to fly. Engineers, who had never studied gulls but who had studied man's flight, told him he shouldn't do it. They pointed out to him how the center of pressure would shift on his wings. But Bonny glared his glittering faith at them, snuggled his dream in close, and flew. He took off all right. He roared across the field, and if he didn't sound quite like a gull, he looked the part. He rose into the air for all the world like a giant gull. He pulled off in a steep climb, and the wise men wondered if again they were proved wrong by an ignorant fanatic. Their wonder didn't last long. When Bonny tried to level out, he nosed over and dove straight into the ground, like a gull diving into the ocean for a fish. We rushed out to the wreck. Bonny was quite dead. There was scattered around him not only the remains of his own gull wings, but thousands of the feathered remains of other gull wings. He had dived straight into the shallow grave of all the gulls he had killed. COB-PIPE HAZARDS Silly little things are apt to crack you up sometimes. I did an outside loop at Akron once. I came up over the top of the loop and started right down into another. I didn't want to do another, so I pulled back on the stick to stop it. It wouldn't come all the way back. It was jammed some way. The ship was nosing steeper and steeper into the dive. I rolled the stabilizer, and that enabled me to pull the nose up. I couldn't keep it up if I cut the gun more than halfway. I knew I would have a tough time landing like that. Besides, although I had a chute, I knew that when...
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Book was in beautiful condition. Dust jacket as well. Book itself, the content, is marginal. Good points are it refers to Jimmy Collins at the Army Air Corps training at Kelly Field TX at the same time; it refers to Lindbergh's Lockheed "Sirius;" and it gives a good accounting of what "pulling G's" is all about when piloting an airplane.
