Everything he’d told me! I tried to remember one single thing, as I realized I was being invited to solo without so much as trying a landing or takeoff myself.
I looked at the rotors over my head and the unfamiliar gadgets before me on the instrument board and I began to feel exactly as I had when I made my first solo in any airplane eleven years before.
Mr. Ray stood beside the autogiro, unbuckling his parachute.
“I’ll wait for you here,” he said, indicating a small hillock in the landing field.
“Just what my first instructor said,” I thought to myself, and wondered that his words should so fit the present situation. For here I was a novice again, with all of the uncertainty of a beginner.
No other person has had so many autogiro hours as Jim Ray. He knows more about the habits of the whirligigs than anyone but the inventor. No wonder I felt self-conscious in his presence!
Thinking over the moment when the autogiro rose into the air, I am at a loss now to say whether I flew it or it flew me. I only know that suddenly I found myself peering down upon some tree tops and sailing along merrily over a country road almost before I was aware “we” had hopped off.
Rut it doesn’t take long to become used to the autogiro, if it is handled like a regular airplane. I found that out when I came in for the first landing. I also found out there are many tricks to learn, if one wishes to get out of it, all that it is capable of.
