I walked around the ship and looked it over. The engineers pointed out special features and talked metal construction and forged fittings and stress analysis and safety factors, and I asked questions. I was fascinated by the wires that braced the wings. They looked big enough to hold up the Brooklyn Bridge. I liked those wires.
I learned that a pilot had been up there and had gone over the whole stress analysis with them and had recommended only one little change in the ship, which had been made. I learned that he had expressed willingness to dive the ship after that, but that he had been unable to because another job he had contracted to do some time previously was coming up at the same time this one was. I was glad to hear this man had gone over the ship. He was not only one of the most, if not the most, competent test pilots in the country, but also a very good engineer, which I was not.
I crawled into the cockpit. There were more gadgets in it. Something for everything except putting wings back on in the air. The racket had changed, I decided. In the old days, dive demonstrating hadn’t been so accurate a thing. You took a ship up and did a good dive with it and came down and everybody was happy. But now, as I could see, they had developed a lot of recording as well as indicating instruments. You used to be able to get away with something. You couldn’t get away with anything now. They could take a look at all those trick instruments after you had come down and tell just what you had done. They could tell accurately and didn’t have to take your word for it.
There was one instrument there, for instance, that the pilot couldn’t see. It was called a vee-gee recorder. It made a pattern on a smoked glass of about the size of one of those paper packets of matches. This pattern told them, after the pilot had come down, just how fast he had dived, what kind of a dive he had made, and what kind of a pull-out he had done.
There was another instrument there that I had never seen before. It looked something like a speedometer and was called an accelerometer. I was soon to find out what that was for! Oh, they told me what it was for then. They explained everything in the cockpit to me, and I sat there and familiarized myself with it as best I could on the ground before taking the ship out. But I wasn’t really to find out what that accelerometer was for until I used it. And did I find out then!