CHAPTER TWO

Commissioned – But Perhaps Not Quite

Nothing happened for several months. Then, in February 1954, I was summoned by letter to attend No. 1 Central Medical Board in London at a week’s notice. Enclosed with the letter was a warrant for a third-class ticket for the journey by boat and train, but no offer to meet any of the likely expenses of the thirty-six hours that I would have to spend getting to and from London. I assumed that this parsimony was normal Air Ministry practice, exchanged the warrant, paid a supplement to convert my ticket from steerage to first-class for the overnight boat-trip to Liverpool – an upgrade that was absolutely essential to ensure any degree of comfort on that journey – and set off for a medical examination that I hoped would be no more searching than the one I had had for QUAS.

The morning of my examination was one of the coldest of that winter, and I was well chilled by the time I found the Board’s location in Cleveland Street. Things started promptly, and I had hardly time to thaw out before being called for the first round of tests. By mid-morning, with everything apparently going well, I was beginning to feel relaxed about the outcome. However, it had been noted that I had the inherited skin condition Ichthyosis – which made my hide extremely dry and flaky, particularly in low temperatures. The medical officer collating the results of the various tests suggested that this might well be a bar to my being accepted. ‘With that skin you will never be able to serve in the tropics,’ he said. I had never been anywhere hotter than France in mid-summer but I was sure that this opinion was wrong. I had put up with the physical discomfort of my skin condition for as long as I could remember, and had suffered not a little embarrassment at school because of it, and now here was a doctor threatening my future hopes by apparently straying beyond his field of knowledge.

‘Before you make any decision about that,’ I said vehemently, ‘you had better consult a skin specialist, for your opinion conflicts with my experience. I’ve lived with this skin and I can assure you that it gets better the hotter the weather is. I don’t like icy conditions but I can tolerate them. My skin has never held me back in any way.’

I don’t know whether he was swayed by any of this or whether he did consult a specialist but a month later I was informed that my application to join the RAF as a pilot had been accepted.

On 17 March 1954, after another night on a boat from Belfast, I was on a cross-country train bound for RAF Kirton-in-Lindsey in Lincolnshire, to join a course of Officer Cadets at No. 1 Initial Training School, medically graded A1G1 Z1 – absolutely all right for functioning in the air and on the ground, and with no climatic restrictions on where I might serve. I had been given the rank of Acting Pilot Officer on an eight-year short service commission, to take effect upon my arrival at Kirton. The fact that nothing was assured after the eight years had expired did not worry me at all. I was doing what I wanted to do and I was happy to leave aside for the time being all thoughts of how I might deal with the longer term.

For the next three months the course was instructed in the ways of the Service, tested on leadership skills, and endlessly marched up and down the drill-square (as an officer, and already well-practised in drill courtesy of the TA, I was allowed to loiter indolently on its edge and watch). We were advised how to behave as officers and how to try to be gentlemen. We became fit as never before from multiple sessions in the gym, cross-country running, ‘escape and evasion’ exercises, and a lot of rugby in my case. I found the three months surprisingly enjoyable but like the rest of the course I was eager to move on, the others because it meant commissioning and a start to flying, and me a return to the latter.

We were all posted to No. 6 Flying Training School, at RAF Ternhill, Shropshire, at the beginning of July, becoming No. 109 Course there. As we checked into the Officers’ Mess on the afternoon of our first day we were handed an information folder containing a variety of orders and instructions. Among these was a direction to present ourselves outside the Mess at 1800 hours in the flying kit that we were to pick up beforehand, to be photographed in the two flights into which we had been allocated as per the instructions.

We did all this, and again as instructed, we changed after the photographs into our best uniforms and assembled in the Mess bar where we were welcomed by a group of officers who introduced themselves as our instructors to be. As the party progressed we were subjected to a number of odd questions and a lot of deliberately frightening stories about what lay ahead. We should have realised that it was all a joke and that the ‘instructors’ were in fact members of the senior course in borrowed uniforms. However, the penny didn’t drop until we had paraded, again as per the written instructions, outside the Mess at 0700 hours the following morning in PT kit to jeers, laughter and applause from the members of the other courses packing the Mess windows. And to compound our discomfort we later found the photographs that had been taken the night before, suitably captioned and pinned on the Mess notice board.

Later that morning we were marched to ‘Ground School’ by a real member of staff, told in outline how the next nine months would be spent, learned that one ‘pupil pilot’ flight would fly in the mornings and one in the afternoons. The flight not flying would be engaged in ‘ground training’, which would comprise a wide variety of things – lectures, physical fitness activities, initiative exercises, and so on. The first fortnight would be spent entirely in Ground School. We were also told that although we were all now officers we would be required to march everywhere as a body, salute all commissioned staff members and in the air, were to address all instructors, commissioned or otherwise, as ‘Sir’. These measures, and the aggressive manner in which we were informed of them, suggested that we were not going to be viewed at Ternhill as quite the fully commissioned officers we thought we had become, and an incident in the Mess a few days later rather confirmed this for me.

The dining room in the Mess stretched out on either side of the double doors opening into it. Tables to the right of the doorway were reserved for the permanent staff and, at breakfast, newspapers were spread on a side-table nearby. To the left of the doorway was a similar side-table on which the same number of newspapers was laid out for the pupils. Because there were many more pupils than staff living in the Mess the papers on the left-hand table had invariably gone a few minutes after breakfast started. Seeing none to the left on my third morning, but plenty to the right, I went and picked one up from there. I had barely done so when a Mess waitress ran after me shouting ‘Ere! You can’t take them; them’s officers’ papers’. I couldn’t help wondering at this point if I had gleaned a rather too rosy impression of Service life from my brief spell at Biggin Hill.

After our briefing in Ground School on the first day we were marched down to the ‘flight line’ to meet our real instructors, be shown over the accommodation there, and have a look at the aircraft. No. 6 FTS was equipped with the Provost T1, the aircraft that was then the RAF’s basic trainer. It was, we were told, as we were shown over an aircraft in the hanger, ‘easy to fly’– it got off the ground at 65 knots and landed at 55 – and its 550 bhp Alvis Leonides radial engine was a splendidly reliable piece of machinery. This last piece of information was good to know, and we all fastened on to it, but my main thought as I looked at the engine was that it would probably be a bit difficult to see around when taxiing; even an aircraft with as small an in-line engine as the Chipmunk, and fitted with a tail-wheel, required a fair bit of weaving about when moving on the ground in order to see what was ahead. However, that was a small problem and, after a walk around the Provost, and a brief sit in the cockpit, I was happy with the thought that this aircraft was going to be easy for an ace with 121 Chipmunk hours under his belt!

While we were having our look around an opportunity was offered to two members of the course to get airborne as passengers in a nine-ship Provost formation that some of the instructional staff were about to fly. Names were put in a hat and, in due course, the two winners went off to have their introduction to flying. The rest of us watched from outside the pupils’ crew-room as the nine Provosts started up, taxied out and took off. Some thirty minutes later we went outside again to see them as they returned, flying over the airfield in a diamond formation. As they crossed in front of us the propeller of the aircraft in the middle of the formation chopped the tail off the aircraft in front of it. Shocked, we watched the tail-less Provost plough into the ground about a hundred yards from us. It was very obvious that there would be no survivors. A little later we learned that one of our course members had been in it. The following day our number went down further when, given the option in the aftermath of the accident, two of our fellows decided to transfer to another, non-flying, branch of the RAF.

A fortnight later, we had learned all about the innards of the Leonides, plus details of the Provost’s electrical circuits (24-volt generator and batteries), its fuel system (32 gallons), its engine-driven compressor (supplying air at 450 lbs/square inch for flaps, air intake shutters, windscreen wipers, and at 150 lbs/square inch for the brakes), the functioning of its constant-speed propeller, and its six-shot cartridge starter system. We had also covered air traffic control procedures, radio communication procedures including the Morse code, aircraft emergencies, aerodynamics, aviation medicine, meteorology, and had been enjoined to follow the principles of ‘good airmanship’. We were ready to graduate in earnest to the flight line and begin flying.

When we started I found myself allocated to a real gentleman of an instructor, a Sergeant-pilot from Belfast named Dalzell, another Harry Dodd type. His sympathetic and friendly approach to instruction was absolutely right for me and made my transition from Chipmunk to Provost straightforward and swift. His approach to instruction was also very suited to the side-by-side cockpit seating in the Provost as he made much – and effective – use of pointing, gesture and head movement while he spoke from behind his oxygen mask. All of this was a great improvement on the disembodied voice from the back cockpit and I quickly became a devotee of side-by-side seating. Sadly, Sergeant Dalzell, whose first name I never thought to ask, was posted from Ternhill shortly after he sent me solo on the Provost, and I never came across him again in what was still a large Air Force, compartmentalised by its division into specialist Commands.

He was replaced as my instructor for the rest of the course by a lugubrious Flying Officer who handled the Provost as if he was still dodging flak in one of the bomber aircraft that he had flown during the War. On our first trip together, while demonstrating how to make a short landing at a nearby grass airfield used by the FTS for ‘circuits and bumps’ and first solos, he appeared to be aiming directly at what looked like an old grassed-over bomb crater right on the airfield boundary. In the snapshot view that I had of this depression as we hit its edge I could see that it was not more than a couple of feet deep. I fully expected the Provost to catch its wheels, nose over and lose its propeller. However, we bounced clear without the slightest damage. There was no time to be alarmed by the incident before it was past; I simply hoped that none of the instructors I saw sitting on their parachute packs by the air-traffic caravan as we careered past it thought it was the pupil who was doing the flying–a shameful bit of vanity on my part. He was a conscientious and considerate instructor but he was predominantly a ‘straight and level’ man and I, arrogantly enjoying an easy introduction to the Provost, did not initially warm to him. As a result we sat politely with each other on trip after trip during the early phases of the course without developing anything approaching camaraderie.

The syllabus progression was much as it had been at QUAS except that we were now being introduced to extras such as instrument flying, cross-country navigation and, towards the end of the course, to night-flying. Until we could be assessed as fit to fly in cloud we were dependent on good weather for our solo flying and so, to get us on the way to a qualification for flight on instruments, we were introduced to ‘simulated’ instrument flying practice well before the end of the summer. This took place in clear skies, with the instructor on alert for collision avoidance. The world outside the cockpit was totally obscured for the pupil by a combination of goggles with purple lenses and orange screens fitted temporarily inside the cockpit windows. The first time I tried the goggles I wondered how I was going to cope as I could barely see the instruments. I assumed without question that this was deliberate obscuration in the interests of intensifying the value of the practice.

And so, through full instrument panel practice, through ‘partial panel’ when the main flight instruments were covered by card secured by sticky tape, and on to ‘unusual positions’ where the aircraft was put into either a spiralling climb not far from the stalling point, or some other unattractive position requiring immediate corrective action, I persevered, peering desperately at barely readable instruments, and not doing at all well. I knew that my lack of progress would be written up in the dual-sortie reports kept on each pupil and so I wasn’t too surprised to find myself scheduled to fly on an instrument dual with the CFI. Before we got airborne he gave me a very thorough briefing on instrument flying but it was not until after take-off that enlightenment came: the purple goggles he had handed me were transparent; I could see the instruments clearly and, suddenly, what had been difficult became very straightforward. I wasn’t privy to what may have been said to my instructor after we landed but he had a new set of goggles to hand me the next time we flew together on instrument practice. All the airborne instrument work, supplemented by more simulation in a rather rudimentary bit of kit on the ground, the Link Trainer, culminated in a test that qualified us to do limited flying in cloud.

The Link Trainer¹ was essentially an enclosed windowless cockpit (with seat, control-column, and standard instrument panel) mounted on a pedestal. Bellows inside the pedestal could move the cockpit through 360 degrees horizontally, and to 50 degrees of pitch and bank, a range of motion sufficient even for the simulation of spins and spin recovery. Electo-mechanical linkages converted control movements into instrument readings repeated at an instructor’s console. The console also had a chart-table on which a pen-recorder could move to show how the occupant of the cockpit was coping with various air traffic procedures involving ground beacons, airfield approach aids, runway approach aids, and the like.

The aids that were available to us at the time included the Voice Rotating Beacon. This device consisted of a constantly rotating aerial that transmitted two signals on a VHF frequency, one a continuous tone, and the other an announcement of the reciprocal bearing of the beacon every 20 degrees, heard by an aircraft only when the associated aerial was directed towards it. Then there was Radio Range, a beacon that broadcast signals designed to indicate to the pilot which side of the beacon’s narrow beam he was on. And there was Direction Finding, where an operator on the ground would manually rotate an aerial to enable him to find an airborne transmission’s loudest signal and hence the direction from which it was coming; this was in the process of being automated to produce, on a cathode-ray tube, an instantaneous presentation of the direction (CRDF) of a VHF, and later, a UHF transmission.

One solo flying activity that was particularly popular throughout the course was ‘practice forced landings’, possibly because these provided a personally competitive test of developing skills. Or, perhaps, because they allowed us to fly close to the ground long before we were considered ready for low-flying. Practice forced landings involved chopping the power back to minimum boost, usually in the middle of another exercise, looking around for a field large enough to land in, and near enough to glide to, and manoeuvring to get over its boundary at a speed and height that would allow a safe landing within its confines. Once it was clear that this ideal pre-landing position was – or was not – going to be achieved, a fistful of boost was selected and the aircraft climbed safely away. One of the essential requirements for climbing away was to ensure that the constant-speed propeller had been preselected to fine pitch. Coarse pitch was great for achieving economy in straight and level flight, rather like a fifth gear on a car, and it reduced drag from the propeller sufficiently to extend the glide if a real engineless forced landing had to be made. Fine pitch was essential for an effective bite at the air when manoeuvring; it was always used for take-off and landing. One of our fellow pupil pilots got rather too close to the ground on his first solo forced landing practice without remembering to select fine pitch and, in spite of selecting maximum boost for the over-shoot, touched down in his chosen field. Air Traffic Control at Ternhill heard a faint distress call on the emergency frequency and, as is standard procedure, asked the sender for his position. ‘I’m upside down across a hedge,’ was the reply. As the cockpit of the Provost always smelled strongly of high-octane fuel, even when the right way up, and as one of the required actions prior to a real forced landing was to switch off all electrics, including the radio, the rest of us felt that he might have been wiser to have switched off and waited for someone to find him.

We started night-flying towards the end of November by which time we were sufficiently familiar with the Provost to take the new experience in our stride, and after a couple of dual sorties most of us were sent solo. There were little things to be wary of that hardly mattered during daylight, given that we were not going to be required to take off in cloud, such as the false reading that the artificial horizon gave as the aircraft accelerated. And there were little bits of wisdom to be learned such as the value of carrying torches against the possibility of the loss of electrics and therefore of cockpit lighting. However, by now we had all come to accept that the Provost was reliable as well as robust, and it gave none of us any serious reason to be nervous about going off alone in the dark, or thumping down on the runway as we returned. Night cross-country trips were conducted largely by following a triangular course from airfield identification beacon to airfield identification beacon and, provided these were not obscured by bits of clouds when we felt we should be seeing them, navigation sorties caused no concern either.

Early in the new year we moved on to simple formation flying and a lot more navigation trips, including some low-level ones. Low level for the courses meant nothing below 500 feet but it was a new and vastly more interesting experience than cruising along at higher level, often something close to full-throttle height.²

The first week in March, 1955, the final week at Ternhill, contained little more than the ‘Final Handling Test’ and, for some of us, a flight with an instructor who had the task of judging our attempts to compete for the 109 Course Aerobatic Trophy. I had been putting together what I hoped might be a winning five-minute aerobatic routine, practising it at odd moments over the previous fortnight. The finale of my routine was to be a ‘falling leaf’, a manoeuvre that I had seen performed at an air show but really knew nothing about. The general consensus among the instructors whom I questioned about it was that the manoeuvre was simply a matter of inducing an incipient spin with rudder hard over one way and, before the spin had a chance to develop, slamming the rudder hard across thereby generating an incipient spin the other way. One then continued from one incipient spin into another for as long as height allowed. This did seem to work and I felt sure that it would look good from the ground. However, the judge was not watching from the ground and I don’t think that he was greatly impressed by having his head slammed from side to side by the erratic motion induced by my falling leaf.

The results of the aerobatic competition were announced, along with various other awards, at the formal dining-in night held to mark the end of the course. I didn’t win that trophy but quite unexpectedly found myself presented with the ‘Eustace Broke Loraine Memorial Cup’, awarded to the ‘Best All Round Pupil’. I mention this, not from lack of modesty (after all I had had a 121 hour head start on my fellow course members), but to make a point that I was shortly to learn: success can be a transitory thing.

Of the original twenty-six members of 109 Course, nineteen graduated. Apart from the one who had perished before we started, and the two who had thought better of it, one went quickly when he was found to have poor depth perception and could not judge his height well enough to round-out for a three-point landing, another could not conquer air-sickness despite a brave and prolonged attempt to do so, and two just did not come up to scratch in one way or another. All nineteen were posted for training on jet aircraft – eighteen on the Vampire and one on the Meteor.