Probably, too, there is a pale green tube of glass, slightly curved and with a bubble floating in it. It shows you when the machine is level, laterally.
Compare the simplicity of that cockpit with the pilots seat in a modern twin-engined machine. His controls are very nearly the same—a joy-stick (we call it a control-column these days) and rubber But before him is a board containing the most impressive array of instruments imaginable. Anything from 20 to 30 dials register such obscure things as engine boost-pressure, oxygen supply, position of the retractable under-carriage, angle of the variable pitch propellers.
"Signal Box"
Instead of the simple ratchet that controls the throttle, he has a gantry of arms in the.centre of the cockpit—a miniature railwaymen's signal-box.
These control the pitch of the propeller, the mixture of the fuel, the speed of the engines, and, in some planes, the rows of bomb-racks beneath the plane.
On top of all that, he has controls for the wing flags which slow him down when he is landing, and for the wheels which he tucks away neatly when he is flying.
When he is on a bombing or reconnaissance flight, he has to think as well Apart from the control of his plane he is responsible for watching for enemy machines.
Strapped to his mouth is the oxygen feed that is necessary at heights of more than 15,000 feet. He must remember to turn that on and keep it at the right pressure, otherwise, and without warning, he is likely to collapse at his controls.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.