AEROPLANES

 

From my boyhood of being mad on aeroplanes and flight, through to now, wanting to avoid airports and flying, encompassed a life of enormous interest in flying through the air in both peace and war.

I look back nostalgically on incidents that have shaped this extreme interest. 

My first real contact with aircraft was with an Avro utor biplane. For my part I already knew the principals of flying pretty well from my book, the Pictorial Flying Course, written by W.H. Johns, the author of Biggles Books. But actually climbing into the spare cockpit of this Alan Cobham’s Flying Circus aircraft to fly over the Solent and doing a loop-the-loop (7/6 all in) sent me on my way.

The next landmark, when I was seven in 1932, was a flight over London in a Klemm  Bat from Croydon Aerodrome (London’s main grass field airport at that time).

Kingsford Smith, a pioneer Australian aviator, was due to take me, my brother Ni and sister June on this flight, but the tail skid on his plane broke, as did the wooden replacement. So, with the boy’s caps worn back to front, the roar of the partly exposed engine up front, and hanging on to the sides of the cockpit for grim death, gave an idea how Germans felt when flying in this type of aeroplane that was secretly used for training Nazi Luftwaffe pilots in Germany at that time.

Then came the Second World War when I returned from America to join the RAF, 

to be told to wait in Civvy Street until pilot training was available. 

I took the job of a prop-swinger. This involved starting up the engines by swinging the props  of Tiger Moths for students to reach their first solo stage. 

The authorities at RAF Theale, having learned of my being a would-be RAF pilot allowed me to fly as passenger, and sometimes pilot, on weather flips. These involved flying up wind to forecast the weather, there being no meteorology at the time. 

This experience did me well when I was eventually back in the RAF as a trainee pilotMy first (the greatest day in my pilot’s life) was flying solo from a farmer’s grass meadow at RAF Shellingford (a few sheds, Tiger Moths and Nissan huts). 

Now, stationed in America’s Oklahoma, I completed my flying training in Cornells and Harvards to become qualified to fly Hurricanes or Spitfires. 

Fortunately, the war had ended in Europe and I was grounded and returned to England to become a Photographic Intelligence Officer. 

From a drawing trip around the world I returned home from the American continent in a “Whispering Giant”, a Bristol Britannia prop jet, as I was then nearly out of money and to fly across the Atlantic in the emerging new Boeing 707 jet was too costly. 

When automatic landing was invented, I flew to Paris in a Trident aircraft, landing in dense  fog at Le Bourget’s Paris airfield. From my own flying experiences, this seemed quite magical and a brilliant advance. 

But my fondest memories of those post-war days was flying to France in a Bristol Wayfarer. This involved motoring to Lydd, a greenfield in Kent, where handlers would drive three cars into the jaws of this bulky, twin engined, workhorse of an airoplane, take our seats next to the pilot and then trundle over the Channel’s waves to the Le Touquet airfield in France. This was old-fashioned flying at its charming best.

It was a wonderful way of reaching Europe and, I suppose, the last of those days of flying unsophisticated propeller aircraft in civil aviation.