THESE WORDS this flying cadet heard in '18 from his flying instructor were, and are, words youth hears always.

"Tomorrow you "'go solo'."

Preparation and training, past and done with. Now for the main thing; the big thing. Trying one's wings for the first time.

Thousands of flying cadets heard these words in '18. Men from the colleges who had left the campus to qualify as war pilots in the air service.

Thousands of men in colleges today are waiting to hear them. Are preparing for the baccalaureate signal to leave the campus and attempt to qualify for whatever place in life they aspire to. For them, particularly:

"Tomorrow you 'go solo'."

Tomorrow we fly alone!

What is such a "first solo" experience? In a sense, always much the same. In 1918--in 1929. Wartime or peacetime. Army or business. A mental hazard-the "wind up" fear of the unknown and of self-then a man "comes through" according to whatever he has in him to draw upon.

The flying cadet in the picture above had a typical "first solo" and relates is as follows:

At his first "take off" alone, as he tells it, his heart was up around his Adam's apple where it had no business. The more so when the usual little brown ambulance drew up to wait at one corner of the broad flying field.

He got his "ship" off somehow. Or rather, the "ship" got itself off. He could see groups of cadets and "monitors" ahead down the field break and run for the fences as he came tearing toward them-probably zigzagging every which way-"craziest 'solo' in history!" Just couldn't get the "ship" headed straight. They called it a "ship"! It felt more like a slithering shingle!

The first climb for "altitude"-that was the hard part the part he always remembered. In those few wild seconds of finding himself it was probably fifty-fifty whether he would make it--or crash.

Incredibly, he began to hear voices--two voices. (He insists that he "heard" them; no "Imagination" no, sir!) As from two invisible-well, "microphones," as one would say now. At either end of the cowl in front of him. And he himself some Third Person. A petrified audience of one.

One Voice-the one on the left-mean and pretty hateful-kept calling at him!

"You're going to fall! You're going to fall! You'll never make it! You're going to fall!"