THE INDEPENDENT
and all talk about “tacking” is meaningless. Imagine the air current to be a river running 10 miles per hour. If you go against the current, making 20 miles per hour, your net progress will be but 10 miles per hour. If your propeller makes you 20 miles per hour with the current, your net speed becomes 30 miles per hour. Well, it is just so in an airship. In a calm it makes its own speed, unaffected by wind current.
The navigator of the air, however, has one great pleasure unknown to the navigator of a river. He can seek to change one air current for another. The air is full of varying currents. Mounting, I have often sought and found either a calm or an advantageous breeze, even in a spherical balloon; and this is one of the ever-changing delights of the aerial realm.
Before going on my first airship experiment I really wondered if I should be seasick. I imagined that the sensation of mounting and descending obliquely (with my shifting weights) might prove queerish, and I looked forward to a deal of pitching—not rolling—another novelty in ballooning. For, remember always, the spherical balloon gives no sensation of movement at all.
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In my first airship, however, the suspension was so long that it approximated that of a spherical balloon. For this reason there was very little pitching. And speaking generally, since that time, tho I have been told that on this or that trip I pitched considerably, I have never been seasick in the air.
You see in the airship there is no smell. All is pure and clean, and the pitching itself has none of those shocks and hesitations of the boat at sea. The movement is suave and flowing, owing to the immensely lesser resistance of the air. The pitches are less rapid than at sea; the dip is not brusquely arrested—so the mind can anticipate the curve to its very end and be prepared. There is no shock to give that “empty” feeling as the giant transatlantic construction rises out of the water, first its fore part, then its aft, with its propeller churning the air so viciously, to sink the next moment and churn the water.
All this brings me to the most remarkable of all the sensations of aerial navigation. This is the wonderful diagonal flight. On my first trip it actually shocked me. Man has never known anything like free vertical existence. Held to the plane of the earth, his movement “down” has scarcely been more than a return after a short excursion “up,” our minds always remaining on the plane surface, even while our bodies may be
