It is quite peculiar to flying that one is incredulous of any collision.  Some time ago I was in a motor-car that ran over and killed a small dog, and this wretched little incident has left an open wound upon my nerves.  I am never quite happy in a car now; I can’t help keeping an apprehensive eye ahead.  But you fly with an exhilarating assurance that you cannot possibly run over anything or run into anything—­except the land or the sea, and even those large essentials seem a beautifully safe distance away.

I had heard a great deal of talk about the deafening uproar of the engine.  I counted a headache among my chances.  There again reason reinforced conjecture.  When in the early morning Mr. Travers came from Brighton in this Farman in which I flew I could hear the hum of the great insect when it still seemed abreast of Beachy Head, and a good two miles away.  If one can hear a thing at two miles, how much the more will one not hear it at a distance of two yards?  But at the risk of seeming too contented for anything I will assert I heard that noise no more than one hears the drone of an electric ventilator upon one’s table.  It was only when I came to speak to Mr. Grahame-White, or he to me, that I discovered that our voices had become almost infinitesimally small.

And so it was I went up into the air at Eastbourne with the impression that flying was still an uncomfortable experimental, and slightly heroic thing to do, and came down to the cheerful gathering crowd upon the sands again with the knowledge that it is a thing achieved for everyone.  It will get much cheaper, no doubt, and much swifter, and be improved in a dozen ways—­we must get self-starting engines, for example, for both our aeroplanes and motor-cars—­but it is available to-day for anyone who can reach it.  An invalid lady of seventy could have enjoyed all that I did if only one could have got her into the passenger’s seat.  Getting there was a little difficult, it is true; the waterplane was out in the surf, and I was carried to it on a boatman’s back, and then had to clamber carefully through the wires, but that is a matter of detail.  This flying is indeed so certain to become a general experience that I am sure that this description will in a few years seem almost as quaint as if I had set myself to record the fears and sensations of my First Ride in a Wheeled Vehicle.  And I suspect that learning to control a Farman waterplane now is probably not much more difficult than, let us say, twice the difficulty in learning the control and management of a motor-bicycle.  I cannot understand the sort of young man who won’t learn how to do it if he gets half a chance.