Pilots wore gloves or long flying gauntlets to protect their hands during flight operations. During the Battle of Britain, they often complained about the gloves provided to them by the Air Ministry because they did not fit well over the sleeves of the heavy insulated shearling Irvin jackets. As a result, pilots often decided to fly without the gloves and sometimes suffered serious burns to their hands in cockpit fires. The standard type of glove worn during the Battle of Britain was the 1933 Pattern flying gauntlet, but many pilots abandoned the gloves in favour of the chamois linings that were issued with the gloves, wearing them to retain better feel over their aircraft. The 1941 Pattern flying gauntlet was a marked design improvement, and proved that the Air Ministry was listening to pilot feedback about equipment. The new gauntlet (shown here) was similar to the earlier model but was elasticated at the wrist and featured a long diagonal zipper so that the Irvin jacket could be tucked into the glove. Some pilots still resisted wearing them, fearing that the heavy leather prevented physical contact with the aircraft controls, but the new design proved so popular with the fresh pilots flooding the ranks of the RAF that manufacturers had difficulty keeping up with demand. The gloves were so prized and prone to theft by workers that left-hand and right-hand gloves were produced at separate factories; this explains why many surviving pairs of the gauntlets are mismatched in colour. A Bomber Command pilot who completed flight training in 1941 recalled that upon his commission he received ‘three pairs of gloves (silk inner, then wool, then the leather gauntlets on top)’.