Page:The Fun of It.pdf/57

Rh invite trouble by flying. But if one can go above sea level safely, one can fly over the Continental Divide, for instance, with no more effect than if one drives or goes by train.

Consciousness of air speed is surprisingly absent when flying. Thirty miles an hour in an automo­bile, or fifty in a railroad train, gives one a greater sensation of speed than moving one hundred miles an hour in a large plane. On the highway every pebble passed is a speedometer for one’s eye, while the ties and track whirling backward from an ob­servation car register the train’s motion.

In the air, there are no stones or trees or tele­graph poles—no milestones for the eye, to act as speed indicators. Only a somewhat flattened countryside below, placidly slipping away or spreading out. Even when the plane’s velocity is greatly altered, no noticeable change in the whole situation ensues—eighty miles an hour at several thousand feet is substantially the same as one hun­dred and forty, so far as the sensations of sight and feeling are concerned.

“I would gladly fly if we could stay very close to the ground,” is a statement that I have often heard in one way or another. As a matter of fact, a plane 100 feet off the earth is in an infinitely more hazardous position than one 3600 feet aloft, all conditions being equal.

One woman told me that she always shut her eyes when the plane was coming down for a land­ing, fearing that if she kept them open, she would