Bill Barnes Air Adventurer, July 1935 — page 110: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

An Orga IR ADVENTURERS, fall in! Lively now! Drop _ that model! On the double! Snappy! Snappy! Dress up your ranks! Count off! You do so, squadron after squadron, in all your thousands. Very good. Air Adventurers, attention! Last month we had our first inspec- tion. This month I am going to give many of you your first order. This first order is extremely impor- tant. Many of you—a very great many of you—have asked me in your letters how you can be of real and immediate service to the cause of aviation. I am going to tell you. Listen carefully. My words, and what you do about them, may save the life of an aviator. Or five. Or fifty! Suppose you are piloting a plane and tun into fog so thick and general that you get lost. Suppose you circle for a long time, as low as you dare, hoping for sight of something that may give you a clue to the direction of an air- port. You circle for hours without sight of a place you dare try set down on—circle till your gas is all but gone —until, in the last few minutes, strain- ing, straining with your eyes, you make out, helow, the rooftops of a little coun- try town. At this vour face will light up, hope will tug at your despairing nization for the heart again, and eagerly you will spiral lower for a better look. A little town. Several hundred build- ings. But you find you can’t recog- nize a single one of them through the fog! Perhaps you have never been over that place before! Not one rooftop tells you where you are! You are probably within several miles of an air- port, but it might as well be a million, for you don’t know which way it is. Then what? Oh, you'll get down, all right! In some one’s cornfield! But you'll crash doing it, and maybe—well, maybe if you're lucky you'll only go to the hos- pital. Fellow Air Adventurers—you who have wanted to know what specific, im- mediate thing you can do in the service of aviation—attention to this order! GO to the leading citizens of your city or town and ask to have its name painted on the largest rooftop, and also an arrow pointing north, with an “N”’ standing above the end of the shaft at right dneles 10 it; O1,-1f there i an airport near by, an arrow pointing in its direction with an “QO” similarly placed. Ask them to do this. If they won’t, you will at least have done what you could, and I'll be proud of you. But many will do it. Good! You Air Ad- COmicloo (C@