1947-57. The demise of the Air Gunner.
In October 1947, a final batch of newly trained gunners graduated from Jurby’s No 11 AGS as its No 72 Course, at which point the unit disbanded. Despite the closure of this, the last remaining, Air Gunners School there was still a residual demand for gunners. In May 1947 AMP had indicated that he ‘hoped to meet this requirement from existing gunners on extended service, gunners (A) recruited from Group A tradesmen, and RAF Regiment gunners, and to meet any shortfall by making use of signallers and to a lesser extent engineers, both of which categories are required to be trained in gunnery.’1 By the spring of 1949, however, shortfalls were already beginning to become apparent, not least because the extended service scheme had been terminated in April 1947.2
Since this had cut off the supply of veteran wartime gunners, it was no longer possible to replace the outflow of three-year extended service men, the last of whom could be expected to have left the Service by mid-1950. It is true that, since 1948 it had been possible for a qualified gunner to sign on for long-term service but most of those who wished to do so had already taken advantage of that offer. The current regulations also made specific provision for direct entrants and/or serving airmen to become gunners but this was hardly a practical proposition at the time because there were no longer any ab initio training facilities. Furthermore, Coastal Command had a lengthening queue of signallers and engineers awaiting cross-training.
Meanwhile, the prototype of the unarmed Canberra had flown and it was clear that the days of the archetypal Bomber Command air gunner were numbered. As a result, the option of long-term service, ie twenty-two years, as a gunner was withdrawn in late 1949, although very limited numbers of five-year regular engagements continued to be available for a while and, to give gunners access to long-term service, they were offered the opportunities of cross-training as signallers or of remustering to a ground trade.3
This constraint was waived in 1951 when, in order to restore, at least a notional degree of, parity with air signallers and air engineers, the option of service to age 55 was made available to air gunners. ‘Notional’ because, while signallers and engineers could expect to fly until they had completed twenty-two years of service before being remustered to a ground trade, it would have been unrealistic for the Air Force to have committed itself to offering gunners full time professional employment until well into the 1970s. In their case, therefore, the offer of service to age 55 contained the proviso that, ‘it may not be possible to retain them on flying duties beyond the term of their original short service (ie five-year) engagements.’4 That said, the option of cross-training to another aircrew category was still available.
There were other facets to the question of parity. If the three SEG categories were to have equal career prospects, they would need to have similar levels of expertise and comparable skill sets. This thinking had been reflected as long ago as 1944-45 in the deliberations of the Douglas Committee which had thought in terms of the comprehensively qualified ‘air gunner/armourer’ (see page 270). This was still the policy in 1948 when consideration was being given to reinstating the, currently suspended, all-through SEG training system. In devising a training sequence for gunners, it had clearly been considered necessary to devise a scheme that would reflect similar demands to those being placed upon signallers and engineers.
At the time it was envisaged that a gunner would undergo a common twenty-week SEG initial training phase followed by forty-six weeks of basic and applied training which would be provided by No 10 SofTT at Kirkham, where the RAF trained its armament tradesmen. The topics to be covered included: general service training; airmanship; technical education and technical instruction covering workshops, small arms, guns, turrets, sights, projectiles, pyrotechnics, weapon carriers and handling equipment; electrical and radar armament equipment; airborne photographic equipment and camera guns; and an introduction to planned servicing and technical administration.
Having cleared this academic and technical hurdle, a new gunner would then attend a twelve-week practical free gunnery course covering: aircraft recognition; the ·303″ Browning; the 20mm Hispano; gun maintenance and cleaning; harmonisation; turrets and their manipulation, including tactics and live air firing; pyrotechnics and an introduction to resistance to interrogation. The final stage would be an OCU course of twelve to eighteen weeks’ duration, depending upon aircraft type. In total, therefore, it was anticipated that a direct entrant gunner would take between 90 and 96 weeks to progress from induction to joining his first squadron.5
In the event, this rather ambitious scheme proved to be very short-lived. Despite the laudable attempt to create a syllabus that would provide gunners with a sound basis for a long-term career, the fact was that gunners had no long-term prospects, so it simply would not have made sense to have made such a heavy investment in training them. Furthermore, it was transparently obvious that, in order to achieve the desired degree of parity with signallers and engineers, the course had been extensively padded. Before the first course had graduated, it was already being pointed out that it would provide a gunner with ‘technical knowledge, not ability, far exceeding that of the average Sergeant Fitter Armourer, and it is unlikely that he would ever be called upon in the performance of his duties to use even a fraction of the knowledge gained.’6 The upshot was that only three Air Gunner All-Through Courses were run, just twenty-three men passing out from Kirkham between March and April 1950.
Once the Wellington had been withdrawn, Leconfield relied on the Lincoln for practical free gunnery training. This one, RE371, with its unit code misapplied (it should readFJ·SH), flew with the CGSfor much of 1951. (MAP)
Nevertheless, from the viewpoint of 1949-50, while it was clear that the demand for men to handle the gun turrets in the remaining Lancasters, Lincolns and Sunderlands could be expected to fade away by the mid-1950s, something still needed to be done about the short-term manning problem, which would be prolonged by the forthcoming Washingtons and Shackletons. Thus, at much the same time as it was having to withdraw the option of long-term service as a gunner, the Service needed to find more of them.
Very conveniently, the answer to this conundrum presented itself in the form of National Servicemen, for whom the long-term problem did not exist, and conscripts had been eligible to volunteer for aircrew duties as a gunner since as early as May 1949.7 So far as regular airmen were concerned, however, when the 1946 Aircrew Scheme was abandoned in 1950, the revised regulations relating to gunners provided only for re-engagement under the terms introduced in the previous year, thus effectively marking the end of recruiting of regular air gunners.8
The recruiting problems aside, wherever the new generation of short-term gunners was to come from, it would be necessary to find somewhere to train them. By October 1949 it was being proposed that a dedicated school should be re-established but this idea was soon abandoned in favour of exploiting the existing facilities of the Central Gunnery School (CGS) at Leconfield where No 1 Air Gunners Course eventually began on 25 April 1950. Early courses were of twelve weeks’ duration, but this was soon reduced to just eight, with practical exercises initially being flown on Wellingtons which were soon supplanted by Lincolns.
At the time the forecast requirement for air gunners was calculated to be 240 for Bomber Command and 122 for Coastal Command.9 The latter was a somewhat academic figure, however, because Coastal Command no longer employed straight air gunners (in 1950 the establishment for the entire Command provided for a total of only five, one per squadron), preferring to rely on dual-qualified air signallers and air engineers, although they would, of course, still need to be trained in gunnery.10
Since the option of regular service as an air gunner had effectively been withdrawn in 1950, the majority of the gunners passing through the CGS turned out to be National Servicemen and, because they would yield little more than a year’s productive service, the throughput had to be much larger than the strength of the front-line would have suggested. In 1951 the forecast intakes, for each of the next three years, amounted to 220 conscript air gunners plus, for Coastal Command, 162 air signallers and air engineers, a substantial proportion of the latter being regulars.11
The last National Serviceman, the 394th to be identified as a potential air gunner since 1 April 1951, was earmarked by the Aircrew Selection Centre at Hornchurch in August 1953. Allowing for the time lag in the system between selection and call-up, and for the time subsequently spent, first in recruit training at Padgate followed by a stint with the Aircrew Training Unit at Driffield (later No 2 Aircrew Grading School at Digby), and possibly ‘on hold’ after that, it was 11 May 1955 before the last batch of eleven ab initio air gunners graduated from the CGS with No 112 Course.
By the time that the supply of post-war straight air gunners finally dried up, the category had already been effectively declared redundant. The withdrawal of the Lincoln and Washington meant that within five years the manning see-saw had tipped again so that the deficit of 1949 had become a surplus. The nature of a National Service engagement meant that the conscript element of the air gunner community soon took care of itself but something needed to be done about the remaining regulars. Since there were now very few professional employment opportunities for them as gunners, in the autumn of 1954 they were again offered the options of transferring to a ground trade or of retraining as air signallers. This time, however, it was not a question of volunteering, it was now a choice that had to be made once an individual had completed his original shortterm engagement, regardless of whether he had subsequently extended this to twenty-two years or accepted an offer of serving to age 55.12
Nevertheless, the RAF still needed people to man the guns in its remaining Sunderlands, its borrowed Neptunes and the Shackletons which would eventually replace both. In order to build up a ‘stock’ of cross-trained men, therefore, substantial numbers of air signallers and air engineers destined for Coastal Command had continued to pass through Leconfield.13 Indeed the final eight courses in the series were entirely made up of air signallers and air engineers, the last of them qualifying with No 120 Course on 31 August 1955.14
Thereafter the Shackleton soldiered on until the 1970s with the twin Hispanos in the Boulton Paul Type N nose installation (the Bristol B17 mid-upper turrets were withdrawn in 1956-57) notionally manned by air signallers (some of whom may well have been remustered air gunners), the latecomers being checked out at the OCU and/or on the squadron. In this context it is interesting to note that in early 1957 an air signaller under training was still ‘required to pass a course in air gunnery …’15 When the regulations were next updated in 1959 there was no reference to gunnery.16
1945-2005. The fluctuating fortunes of the post-war Air Engineer.
As with signallers, the post-war concept of all-through training led to some very optimistic provision being made for the training of engineers. In September 1947, in order to comply with the early post-war ‘all-through’ training policy, it was decided to add a twelve-week initial training phase to the course at St Athan prior to the (essentially 1943-style – see Figure 45 on page 252) seventeen-week preliminary and seven-week type-specific stages, although the numbers undergoing training were expected to be reduced from 250 to 173.17 This was not to be, however, and before the month was out it was announced that the all-through training of aircrew (still often referred to as ‘flight’) engineers had been suspended.18
The withdrawal of the Shackleton’s Bristol B17 dorsal turret (above) in 1957 marked the end of the road for the air gunner; although the Boulton Paul Type N turret in the nose (below) was retained, its twin 20mm Hispanos were handled by other members of the crew. (R Wallace Clarke)
That is not to say that nothing was happening at No 4 SofTT’s No 2 Wing (the element responsible, inter alia, for aircrew training). Beginning in May 1947 it had begun to examine batches of ‘flight engineers, redundant or ex-release accepted for extended service or refresher training’ who were prepared to sign up for a further stint under the terms of the 1946 Scheme.19 In addition to these ‘retreads’, some new blood was introduced in 1948 when No 1 Engineers (Aircrew Interim) Course, the first of three, began on 24 June. Running at fortnightly intervals, each involved twelve ground tradesmen and lasted thirty-six weeks. As with the other SEG categories, however, internal recruiting proved to be a long-term problem and ab initio training, to include direct entrants, as well as remustering ground tradesmen, had been reinstated before the end of the year (see page 284).
Reflecting the, previously noted, need to provide a substantial degree of equivalence between the three SEG categories, the training sequence to be undergone by engineers needed to be comparable in its complexity to those being designed for signallers and gunners. It therefore included the same twenty-week initial phase followed by twenty-four weeks of technical and a further twenty-four of applied training.
The topics covered included general service training, airmanship, technical education and instruction in airframe construction, ignition systems, fuel systems, carburettors and supercharging, engine installations, liquid- and air-cooled piston engines, gas turbines, hydraulics, pneumatics, electrics, propellers, instruments, engine handling, emergency repairs, aircraft loading and balance, and an introduction to planned servicing and technical administration.
Having qualified, a new engineer would then attend a twelve-week practical gunnery course covering: aircraft recognition; the ·303″ Browning; the 20mm Hispano; gun maintenance and cleaning; harmonisation; turrets and their manipulation, including tactics and live air firing; pyrotechnics and an introduction to resistance to interrogation. The final stage would be an OCU course of twelve to eighteen weeks’ duration, depending upon aircraft type. In total, therefore, it would take between 92 and 98 weeks for a direct entrant engineer to progress from induction to joining his first squadron.20
As with signallers, however, there was increasing concern over the manning situation and in the autumn of 1949 the sequence was shortened by six weeks by deleting elements of the general service training content and when facilities for gunnery training became available in 1950, the course was of only eight, rather than twelve, weeks’ duration.
Although the effects would not be terminal (as would be the case with gunners) it was already becoming clear that the imminent withdrawal of piston-engined bombers would substantially reduce the numerical requirement for air engineers and, following a review of the situation during 1950, a new policy was adopted. In future, the training of air engineers was to be ‘based on the type of aircraft on which they will eventually operate’. This was another way of saying that training was now to be so sharply focused that it could be considerably curtailed and carried out by an Operational Conversion Unit (OCU).21 Accordingly, ab initio training at St Athan finally ceased on 8 August 1951,22 the last batch of all-through trainees to graduate as such having been No 14 Course in May.
From 1951 onwards the Service lived off the fat represented by earlier direct entrants who elected to reengage to complete twenty-two years, with their numbers being maintained by men who would be trained under the new scheme. The new generation of air engineers was to be drawn from three sources: volunteer ground tradesmen who were content to fly under the well-established five-year arrangements; direct entrants on longer engagements; and National Servicemen.
The first intake of National Servicemen had actually entered training at St Athan as early as August 1950, the stated aim being ‘to build up a future reserve’. Because they were expected to provide only fourteen months of productive service, however, some practical limitations had to be imposed on their employment.23 Ideally these conscripts were expected to have some prior technical qualification, perhaps an industrial apprenticeship, but this was not always the case and some of them had no significant previous technical expertise.
With No 4 SofTT no longer participating in the training of air engineers, the residual arrangements involved a twelve-week basic course, conducted by air engineer schools embedded within OCUs, followed by the standard type-conversion course. In the case of direct entrants, both regulars and conscripts, this technical instruction was preceded by two months of recruit training, usually at Padgate. Despite the comparative brevity of their training, the only constraints placed on the employment of the new men were that, before being posted to Washingtons they had to have flown a previous tour or have accumulated at least 150 flying hours as an air engineer, and the First Engineer in a flying boat had to have had previous experience as a fitter – but in both cases AOCinCs were granted dispensation to deviate from these standards.
As with air signallers (and again, possibly as a harbinger of the imminent Sandys Defence White Paper) the recruitment of air engineers was suspended in January 1957.24 Like their colleagues many air engineers took advantage of the 1958 redundancy scheme to leave the Service. In 1959 it was announced that, while direct recruiting was still in abeyance, there were ‘limited opportunities for candidates from certain ground trades to apply for a tour of aircrew duty as air engineers.’25
This reference to ‘limited opportunities’ actually masked a significant numerical requirement, too many to be handled on an ad hoc basis. It would be necessary, therefore, to reestablish some form of formal training system. This had not been too difficult to arrange for air signallers when the moratorium on ab initio training was lifted, as their school had remained in commission to run the Air Signallers Advanced Course and to train direct entrant AEOs (see page 314). The situation was very different for air engineers. Because the RAF routinely moves all of its people around on a two-to-three-year cycle, three or four ‘generations’ had passed since St Athan had last trained aircrew back in 1951. As a result: the pool of resident expertise had long since evaporated; all of the old training rigs had been disposed of; and there was very little in the way of a ‘corporate memory’.
The initial attempt at, wholly internal, recruiting was confined to airframe and engine tradesmen of senior technician rank. They were offered a year’s training and five years’ productive flying before resuming ground duties. The prospect of flying pay provided some incentive, but this had to be set against the problems of eventual reintegration into their original trades. On balance the offer proved to be so unattractive that only six applications were received to fill the thirty vacancies on the first course which was duly postponed. The gaps that had to be filled urgently were plugged by hastily assimilating a number of aircraft servicing chiefs (colloquially known as ‘crew chiefs’) as aircrew.26
To alleviate the difficulties with recruiting, the trawl was widened to include instrument and electrical fitters and the entry rank was lowered to corporal in the hope that early promotion to sergeant, as aircrew, would provide the necessary carrot. This lowering of the hurdles had the desired effect and No 1 Course, now containing the required thirty students, began in September 1960.
In the meantime, work had been progressing to devise a suitable training system. The easy option was to exploit an existing course, one actually intended to produce aircraft servicing chiefs, since this already provided adequate technical instruction in all four of the required disciplines. Regardless of their previous qualifications (all candidates would already be skilled in at least one trade), it was decided that all prospective air engineers would have to pass through the full sequence of instruction. This involved sixteen weeks of airframes and engines with No 8 SofTT at Weeton, followed by another sixteen weeks of electrics and instruments at No 12 SofTT at Melksham. Flying badges were presented on completion of an OCU course on the Hastings, Beverley or Shackleton, such courses generally being of five to six months’ duration.
It soon became apparent that lowering the entry rank to permit corporals to apply had still failed to produce the numbers required and more courses proved to be so undersubscribed that they had to be cancelled. Meanwhile, the manning situation was growing worse, not least because Transport Command was taking delivery of a substantial fleet of Argosys.
The roots of the recruiting problem stretched all the way back to WW II when, it will be recalled, the Service had taken a long time to learn that flight engineers needed to be treated as aircrew, and not as ‘flying groundcrew’. This lesson had never been properly digested, however, as the 1946 Aircrew Scheme had shown only too clearly, the RAF spending the next five years doggedly trying to persuade groundcrew to fly on short-term contracts. The fact that it had had to resort to recruiting direct entrant professionals in 1943, and again between 1948 and 1951 seems not have made any lasting impression either. With monotonous predictability, when more air engineers were required in 1959, the Service had once again attempted to find them by misemploying technicians.
There are, and probably always will be, some tradesmen who would like to fly for a time but, despite all attempts to provide appropriate safeguards, this almost inevitably results in some career disadvantage compared to those who keep their feet firmly on the ground. As a result, there will rarely be enough of these men to satisfy the overall requirement. Just as in 1942 and in 1948, what had been needed in 1959 was a scheme offering air engineers full-time service on aircrew terms. Such an arrangement was finally introduced (again) in 1963.27 The necessary manpower was still to be found by drawing on ground tradesmen but they were now able to remuster as full-time aircrew, as were air engineers currently serving under the old short-term arrangements and those who were back on the ground having previously done a stint of flying.
While a permanent solution to the recruiting problem was being sought, the arrangements that had been made for training had begun to unravel. Among the changes in defence policy announced in 1957 had been the ending of National Service, no further conscripts being called up after 31 December 1960. With its intake rapidly shrinking, the training machine contracted over the next few years, both of the units attended by air engineers being closed. The airframe and engines commitment was transferred from Weeton to No 4 SofTT at St Athan during 1964, responsibility for Melksham’s electrical and instrument element of the syllabus being transferred to No 9 SofTT at Newton.
It should be stressed that all four of the schools which were, or had been, training air engineers were essentially ground oriented and even St Athan, once the spiritual home of the flight engineer, had long since lost its touch. As a result, the two-phase system had never been entirely suitable, as was demonstrated by an unsatisfactory failure rate at the OCU stage. Most of this, not least air sickness, could be directly attributed to the total lack of practical, and precious little theoretical, flying content within the technical courses.
Settling for air engineers riding piggy-back on the ‘crew chiefs’ course may have been expedient, but it had never been the right answer. What was really needed was a dedicated course designed for, and preferably taught by, aircrew at a flying station. Pressure for such a course to be provided began to build up and in January 1967 responsibility for air engineer training was vested in Topcliffe where it could be conducted alongside that of AEOps in what was restyled the Air Electronics and Air Engineers School (AE&AES). The first of the new series of Air Engineers Courses began on 13 May 1967. Curiously enough, however, it was identified as No 5 Course, in order to conform to the numbering pattern already established by the resident AEOp brigade.
The new syllabus included practical airborne experience on the Varsity which permitted flying badges to be awarded, as was far more appropriate, on completion of the course, rather than after the OCU stage. To begin with, the majority of trainees continued to be ground tradesmen but direct entrants had been reintroduced in 196628 and by the mid-1970s they represented about half of the intake. The AE&AES moved to Finningley in 1973 where, in anticipation of the withdrawal of the Varsity, preparations began for its replacement by suitably adapted Argosys.29
The four-engined Argosy was an improbably large airframe for the training role but, having recently been withdrawn from transport duties, it was readily available at the relatively small cost of a partial internal refit The idea was to use these aeroplanes to train navigators and, despite their often conflicting individual requirements, AEOps, air engineers and air loadmasters, sometimes simultaneously. There were many in the non-pilot training community at the time (including this writer) who considered this to be a trifle overambitious. Perhaps fortunately, the reservations of the sceptics were never tested because the Argosy trainer project was cancelled in 1975.
Left: The air engineer training simulator built at Finningley, utilising the flight deck of a redundant Argosy. Right: the control panel which permitted the instructor to inject faults. (CRO RAF Finningley).
Following the retirement of the Varsity, for the next thirty years trainee air engineers gained their air experience in the Dominie navigation trainer. This one, No 55(R) Sqn’s XS739, has had its fin trimmed in yellow to commemorate the squadron’s 90th birthday and, to mark the end of an era, it carries an additional inscription on the fuselage which reads ‘Air Engineer Training 1941-2005’. (MAP).
Thereafter, and until their ultimate demise, air engineers gained their airborne experience on the Dominie. There was never a great deal of this, never more than 30 hours, but then engineers never have been overprovided with flying time while under training – none at all during WW II. On the other hand, so long as the simulation is comprehensive and realistic, much of an air engineer’s practical training could be carried out satisfactorily using synthetic aids, including the now redundant Argosy flight simulator at Benson to which the air engineer community was given access.
Prior to this, a training rig based on the Argosy had been built at Topcliffe. This was superseded by the actual cockpit section of a grounded Argosy that was wired up at Finningley, under the direction of MEng A P Bateson, to provide a more representative training facility. This project was supplemented by a Dominie trainer created inside a fibreglass moulding of an actual aircraft, this project being led by MEng R L Williams and FSgt C J Baker. Apart from the provision of the Dominie ‘shape’, these devices were all designed and built on-site, at minimum cost by the instructional staff. It stands as mute testimony to the ‘poor relation’ status that the RAF persistently conferred upon its air engineers that they were still having to provide themselves with essential training aids on a do-it-yourself basis in the 1980s. No substantial investment of public money was made until as late as 1983 when a contract was finally let for the purchase of a Nimrod-based procedures trainer.
Along with all other aspects of non-pilot aircrew training, that for air engineers moved to Cranwell in the autumn of 1995 where it became an element of the NAAS. Thereafter the numbers required declined steadily, partly through the contraction of the Service and partly through the introduction of two-man (a euphemism for two-pilot) flight decks. Thus, for instance, while the original fleet of Hercules C1s and C3s had employed substantial numbers of air engineers, they did not feature in the crews of the later C4s and C5s. Similarly, the air engineers who flew in the Nimrod MR2 would not be required in the ‘glass cockpit’ of the rebuilt (and ultimately cancelled) Nimrod MRA4. So long as the RAF continued to operate its VC10s and Sentrys, it continued to need air engineers but their days were clearly numbered. In 2000 it was forecast that within five years the annual training requirement for new air engineers would have fallen to zero. The last course (No 218) graduated in May 2005.
________________________
1 AIR6/94. From AMP’s undated (but circa May 1947) paper SC(47)23, submitted to the Air Council Standing Committee by Air Chf Mshl Sir John Slessor, for consideration at its meeting 6(47) held on 2 June 1947 (AIR6/90).
2 AMO A.312/1947 of 17 April
3 AMO A.701/1949 of 6 October.
4 AMO A.327/1951 of 14 June.
5 AIR20/9060. The projected training syllabus for gunners, along with those for engineers and signallers, was summarised for the enlightenment of the Post War Manning Committee in Air Ministry memorandum PWPP (48)12 dated 8 April 1948.
6 AIR32/323. Appendix B to TT/29437 dated 31 January 1950, Technical Training Command’s Interim Report on its investigation into all-through training for SEG categories.
7 AMO A.335/1949 of 12 May.
8 AMO A.545/1950 of 31 August, which reinstated traditional NCO ranks, laid down the conditions of aircrew service under the new scheme. So far as gunners were concerned, these were confined to the reengagement options announced by AMO A.701/1949 (see Note 3).
9 AIR2/8443. A minute by Gp Capt D I P MacNair (DDT Wpns) dated March 1950 sketched the following: two gunners per aircraft in each of seven eight-aircraft Lincoln squadrons (112) plus the same for eight projected Washington squadrons (128) plus two per aircraft in each of five five-aircraft Sunderland squadrons (50) plus one (mid-upper) gunner per aircraft in each of the nine planned eight-aircraft Shackleton Mk 1 squadrons (72).
10 AIR20/9060. Memo, dated 21 September 1950, raised by Sqn Ldr R N G Allen as DP2(b) tabulating global manning levels for all SEG categories as at 1 September 1950.
11 Ibid. Memorandum, A953751/DDT Wps dated 22 February 1951, by Gp Capt N H Fresson.
12 AMO A.285/1954 of 25 November.
13 AIR20/9060. A document, C51948/53 dated 21 July 1953, which laid down the future task for the CGS allowed for four eight-week basic gunnery courses to be in residence at any one time with an average strength of fifteen men each, the anticipated annual intake now amounting to 300 air signallers and 80 air engineers, although the actual throughput was somewhat less than this.
14 On 1 January 1955 the CGS became the far more sharply focused Fighter Weapons School which clearly had little use for air gunners. Since Coastal Command was now the sole employer of air gunners, on the same date it assumed responsibility for their training by taking over Leconfield’s Free Gunnery Section which now became the Coastal Command Gunnery School. It remained in situ, operating as a lodger unit within Fighter Command, until the end of the year when, having presumably accumulated adequate numbers of qualified personnel, the closure of the school marked the end of dedicated free gunnery training within the RAF. Coastal Command’s subsequent, and steadily dwindling, residual requirement for instruction in gunnery was handled by No 236 OCU, later the MOTU, at Kinloss.
15 AMO A.2/1957 of 9 January.
16 AMO A.88/1959 of 25 March.
17 AIR2/8297. Air Ministry letter A.895137/773/DDOP of 4 September 1947 set out the anticipated changes that would be required in order to handle the all-through training of air engineers.
18 AIR24/2028. The decision to suspend the plan to introduce all-through training for flight engineers is noted in HQ Technical Training Command’s ORB for October 1947.
19 Ibid. Examination and grading of the first of 105 potential candidates began on 12 May 1947.
20 AIR20/9060. The projected training syllabus for engineers, along with those for signallers and gunners, was summarised for the enlightenment of the Post War Manning Committee in Air Ministry memorandum PWPP(48)12 dated 8 April 1948.
21 Ibid. The new policy was announced by ACAS(Training), AVM T N McEvoy, in Air Ministry letter C.42697/50.DDTO dated 26 February 1951.
22 This very specific date is recorded in St Athan’s ORB (AIR27/2345).
23 AIR20/9060. Air Ministry letter C.42697/50.DDTO dated 13 February 1951 authorised conscripts to fly in Bomber Command aircraft, with the specific exception of Washingtons. It also noted that, while they could be employed on any maritime reconnaissance aircraft, the First Engineer in a flying boat had to have had previous experience as a fitter and, to satisfy the requirement that a proportion of crews on all transport squadrons were to have a VIP category, at least 50% of their air engineers had to be regulars.
24 AMO A.2/1957 of 9 January.
25 AMO A.88/1959 of 25 March.
26 Sponsored by Bomber Command, to fill the gap left by the deletion of the air engineer from the crews of large bombers, and introduced by AMO A.129/1954 of 17 June, the aircraft servicing chief was a highly-trained, multi-skilled ground tradesmen capable of dealing with practically all aircraft systems. Although he had no direct responsibilities in flight, a ‘crew chief’ always accompanied, ‘his’ V-bomber when it operated away from base.
27 AMO A.147/1963 of 24 April.
28 DCI(RAF) S220 of 21 December 1966.
29 AIR6/174. In his paper on ‘Future Aircrew Training in the Royal Air Force’ dated 7 July 1970, which he submitted to the Air Force Board as AFB(70)6, AMP, Air Chf Mshl Sir Lewis Hodges, had noted that, in order to sustain an active fleet of seventeen Argosy crew trainers, it would be necessary to convert twenty aircraft at an estimated cost of £2·8M.