Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1927-06-10

Continued from First Page)
The only thing to do was to open the
| throttle of the plane and let him
use his own judgment about getting
out of the way.
He used it. John had thought he
could, by talking, prevent the air.
plane from leaving, but he suddenly
changed his mind.
When we had got away the second
time, we paid particular attention to
holding to a true course down the
runway. Nevertheless, we ran off to
the left in trying to keep from hitting
anybody.
Again we were done for, as we
found ourselves heading straight for
one of the three.foot stakes which
serve as markers for the runway.
1t looked as if our propeller was sure
to hit it, which would have been
good night" But we missed it
somehow.
A couple of seconds later we were
in the air and were climbing rapidly
and everything was fine.
Found Ship OFF Course.
Chamberlin Immediately began
throttling the engine down, so that it
would not be working at full capacity,
thus lessening the danger of any,
thing happening.
We settled down to our course. We
knew this should take us over New
London and Cape Cod, but somewhere
in the vicinity Of New London we
found we were five miles off our right
course. This made us a little sus-
picious that there might be something
wrong. At Newport we were still
further off.
1t was then that we discovered
that our earth inductor compass, on
which we depended almost entirely,
did not agree with our old magnetic
compass. BY the time we were over
Cape Cod we found our earth inductor
compass was out of order entirely.
That was a tough proposition to
be up against. Before us was the
first water jump of any size, about
$50 miles, and we knew well that,
if we were unable to hold our course
by the aid of the second compass
alone, it might mean going right out
to sea and wandering around over the
water until we ran out of gas and
then abandoning our plane and pad
ding around without oars, in the
we were found land there was a
mighty slim chance of that or until
we starved to death.
We felt a great temptation to turn
back and have our compass repaired
That certainly would have been the
wise and sensible thing to do. We
talked it over for minute but de-
cided to do anything but turn back"
You see, we had been accused in
certain quarters of doing nothing but
lot of talking, and we made up our
minds to show those who thought
that way about us that they were
mistaken.
We resolved to fly over that first
water jump and trust that we would
hit Nova Scotia.
Late at Nova Scotia.
AS soon as we started the head
wind which we had been bucking got
sitter. We had feared it would get
stronger as soon as the sun came up,
but we still had a sneaking hope that
there would be nothing but a gentle
breeze to buck when we began to fly
over the water.
No such luck. We should have
made that water jump in two hours
and a ha1, put at the enO OF Cnroe
and half hours there was still no
sign of Nova Scotia. There was moth
ing but water.
We began. to get anxious. Several
times we thought we saw land, but
we soon found out that we were suf
fering from illusions and also what
their cause was. When there are two
layers OF clouds and the bottom one
is single cloud. the shadow of the
upper cloud makes it look so dark
and solid that you think it is land.
Moreover, when people are so keen
to sight land as we were they are
more easily deceived by appearances
than usual.
We had about decided that as navi-
gators we were not so good, when
suddenly Nova Scotia doomed up be-
low US. AS airmen say, we hit 1t
right on the nose. We found our
selves above Yarmouth, heaved sigh
of relief and felt all puffed up with
new confidence. When we were over
Halifax we felt so good that we de-