Читать книгу H. G. Hawker, airman: his life and work онлайн

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“There was a stream of people to and from the anemometer throughout the day, which instrument happily showed the atmospheric conditions to be little short of ideal. The speed of the wind during the day did not vary more than five to eight miles per hour.

“Raynham, with his wide experience, took the greatest possible advantage of this, and made a really splendid flight, with the Green throttled down to the very slowest revolutions that the machine would fly with, and with the tail dropping in what appeared to be a fearful position to the onlookers. Hawker, with tail well up (and his machine lifts the loads remarkably easily), was flying steadily round at a height of about 400 feet, the A.B.C. emitting a steady hum. Raynham, on the other hand, was flying very low, and on some occasions was only about 30 feet high. By about eleven o’clock he evidently had become extremely bored with pottering round and round, because he commenced a series of antics round the sheds, and at one time about half-way round a turn he suddenly doubled back on his own track, and did a turn or two round the wrong way, all the time, however, with his engine ticking round at something like 950 revolutions per minute only, the appearance of the machine being terrifying to behold to those who dread sideslips.