This Is Mr. Lin Qi

"Are you sure they were two identical aircraft?"

The lieutenant colonel sitting in the car repeated the question several times. The field officer in the front seat nodded solemnly. "Yes, Chief!"

The lieutenant colonel furrowed his brow and said nothing more.

In fact, civilian aircraft development had never stopped. The military had previously funded some civilian scientists to research such things, but so far, there had been no effective results.

The aircraft they produced could indeed fly. There was no doubt about that; otherwise, with the military's already limited Military Expenditure, it would never have been able to throw money around everywhere.

The problem was that once these aircraft took off, they could not land. That was the biggest issue.

More than half of all landing attempts ended in crashes, and seven or eight out of every ten aircraft would ultimately be destroyed by landing problems.

The military could not invest more time and money into such dangerous disposable toys. Instead, it preferred various hot-air balloons and airships.

Airships were still only a concept and had yet to be put into practical use. By contrast, the technology for rapidly ascending hot-air balloons had already matured.

The most common observation balloons needed only twenty seconds to carry a soldier to a height of at least fifteen meters above the ground. With a longer rope and a little more time, they could rise to nearly sixty meters in the air in about a minute!

Equipped with a field radio and binoculars, they could effectively observe areas beyond the line of sight of personnel on the ground. What was more, the things were extremely cheap.

With a few chemical products combined together, they could send a person skyward for at most a few hundred dollars.

Aircraft, however, were much more troublesome. They needed