Accordingly on the twenty-third of January we took off from Lambert Field in five below zero weather and headed for the Sunny South.
Our first stop was at Perryville, Missouri, where we visited with some of Klink’s friends for several days, and carried nineteen passengers. After leaving Perryville we flew to Hickman, Kentucky, and landed in a soft field east of town. We had passed out of the extremely cold weather and the wheels of our plane sank several inches into the southern mud. When we had refueled and attempted to take off, it was impossible to get enough speed to lift the tires out of the mud. So Klink got out and I tried to take off alone. On the third attempt the ship gained enough speed for the wings to begin to carry a portion of the load and keep the wheels from sinking so deeply; then it was only a matter of a few more feet before I was off.
I picked out a hayfield a little further from town, which appeared to be a little more solid than the first, and landed. By that time it was too late to make another hop before dusk, and as even the new field was too soft to make it advisable to carry any passengers, we left the Canuck tied to a fence and went into Hickman for the night.
The first effort to take off the following morning was unsuccessful, also the second. We could not gain a speed of over five miles an hour over the soft ground. Finally, with the assistance of several men pushing on each wing, we got the ship to the top of a gentle rise which gave us enough of a start to take off without serious difficulty. We stopped once in Tennessee for fuel; then at Friar Point, Mississippi, where we landed in an old cotton field and tied down for the night.
The Canuck had only one fuel tank with a capacity of twenty-three gallons or enough to last for two and a half hours. By leaving half an hour for locating a landing field, which was quite difficult at times, we had enough gasoline remaining for about one hundred and twenty-five miles in still air. If we were bucking a head wind it would be just that much less.
We spent the night with one of the plantation hands near the field and the next day in seeing the country and carrying a handful of passengers. In the evening we visited a “hanted” house with a party of the younger residents but were unable to find any “hants.”
Our next stop was at Hollandale, then Vicksburg, where we landed in a little field six miles north of town by slipping in down the side of a small mountain and ground-looping before striking a stump. After a day seeing Vicksburg we flew to Clinton where the passenger trade was quite lively and another day passed making sightseeing flights.
We refueled at Hattiesburg and Mobile, then landed at the Naval Air Station near Pensacola, Florida, where the Commanding Officer showed us every courtesy during our visit.
At last I received notice from the War Department to the effect that my examination had been satisfactorily passed, along with an order to appear at Brooks Field, San Antonio, Texas, in time to enter the March fifteenth class of Flying Cadets.
Klink and I decided to cut short our stay at Pensacola and to work our way as far west as time would allow before it was necessary for me to leave for Brooks Field.
We had promised to take one of the ladies of the post for a short hop before leaving, and on the morning of our departure I took off for a test flight before taking the lady over Pensacola. Just after the ship had left the field and was about two hundred feet high over the bay, the motor “reved” down to about five hundred. I banked around in an attempt to get back to the field but lacked by about fifteen feet enough altitude to reach it, and was forced to land in the sand hills less than a hundred feet from the edge of the flying field. The first hill wiped off my landing gear and one wheel went up through the front spar on the lower left wing, breaking it off about two feet from the fuselage.
A quick survey of the plane showed that we would require a new landing gear and propeller in addition to the material required to splice the spar.
The Navy hauled the plane into one of its large dirigible hangars and allowed us to make use of its equipment in repairing the damage. We purchased a spare landing gear and a propeller, then built a box frame around the broken spar and after gluing all the joints, screwed it in position and wound the splice with strong cord, which was then shrunk tight by several coats of dope. In this way the splice was made stronger than the original spar had ever been.
When we were not working on the ship we made several trips to the old Spanish forts which protected the city during the days when Florida still belonged to Spain. These are in an excellent state of preservation and contain a number of passageways, one of which is supposed to lead underground between the two fortifications, but although we searched carefully for the opening to this tunnel we never found it.
In all we spent about a week
