Arnold was no longer directly involved in Army aviation, but he still kept up with developments in military flying around the world. Friends made at College Park reported the state of air affairs periodically; Tommy Milling, for example, sent “Pewt” a lengthy report from France, describing the state of French aviation in significant and revealing detail. “Ease your mind on the supremacy of the French; they are great little advertisers and have a few specialists in the flying line but the percentage of real flyers is very small. This holds true in both the military and civil end of the work—in fact there are very few in the Army that can really fly. . . . The Army has an immense number of machines of all types—easily over a thousand, but they are not all suited to military purposes. They continue to buy them, single and two seaters, large and small, and as far as I have been able to determine, they are simply stuck in hangars at the different centers and left there.”83