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Aviation History
1919
1919 - 1410.PDF
E® on board His Majesty's ships and their necessary shore bases and establishments, the organisation of the latter being based on existing practice. The group commander will have under his command certain bases for supplying the Fleet. Theioth Group will consist of the R.A.F. establishments maintained for the training of the Royal Air Force and Naval per sonnel required by R.A.F. units co-operating with the Navy at home and abroad. This announcement is definite enough to set at rest, once and for all, the plentiful crop of rumours which has been rife as to intrigues within the Admiralty to regain complete administrative control of the Air Service and to put matters back to where they were prior to 1918. Undoubtedly, efforts have been made in certain quarters to get matters restored to the unhappy state which existed before the creation of the R.A.F. as a separate and distinct Service. Evidently they have met with scant success, and it is devoutly to be hoped that we have now heard the last of them. There remains nothing to be done but to congratulate the authorities of the Admiralty and the Air Ministry on the happy issue of the dis cussions which have led up to so excellent a modus vivendi. The The statements as to the tragic record LCsr°n~ °* *ke air route from London to Cairo Air Route made by Lieut.-Col. Henderson are so serious that the only ground for satis faction in connection with them is that Gen. Seely has stated that an enquiry had been ordered before Col. Henderson's statement was published. Briefly, the allegations are that in the last few months eleven airmen have lost their lives while flying Air Ministry machines from England to Egypt, either through failure of their engines while over the Mediterranean or through crashing when landing on unsuitable aerodromes. It is further stated that machines have been despatched on the journey in deplorable condi tion, after standing for weeks or months in the open at British aerodromes where they have been delivered too late for use in the War. It is quite clear that these are statements which must be probed to the bottom. Obviously, we cannot commit ourselves to any opinion as to the merits of the statements, particularly as the official assur ance has been given that a full enquiry has been ordered. All we can say at the moment is that if enquiry demonstrates that the allegations are true, then the officials or persons responsible should hang for their sins. Whether true or not, there is no getting away from the fact that eleven valuable lives have been lost on this route. Flying has become ordinarily so safe that it might have been thought the. Air Ministry would have taken alarm long before the toll of casualties had mounted as it has done, and would have been at some little trouble to find out whether the route was a suitable one, or whether there was anything the matter with the machines before starting on the journey, or if the fatalities were due to the errors of the pilots themselves. But little seems to have been done until the eve of public disclosure, which we cannot help suspecting was foreseen by the Ministry, which then, and only then, bestirred itself to anticipate publicity. As we say, it is not for us to prejudge the results of the forthcoming enquiry, but it is certain the Air Ministry is badly at fault in having taken no measures to discover why the OCTOBER 30, 1919 London-Cairo route was piling up such a tale of casualties. It seems to be necessary to remind the Ministry that we are not now at war, and that the public is no longer satisfied to accept a long list of killed and wounded aviators as the inevitable price to be paid for victory. In time of war we expect these things, and have to take them "without question, since human life as such temporarily ceases to have value except to the individuals intimately concerned with each casualty. It is different in time of peace, and the public, as well as the individuals, demand that there shall be no avoidable waste of life in its service, and will hold to a strict account departments and officials who by their neglect of obvious precau tions, are the cause of it. In this case, although it is too early to impute specific blame to anyone, it certainly would appear that the enquiry now to be held is woefully belated. Had it been inaugurated three months ago it would have been very different. In a series of recently-published articles Startling in the Morning Post, a correspondent, Charges ^Q contents himself with the nom de Waste plume of " Argonaut," makes a whole and volume of sweeping charges of waste Incompetence and incompetence against the Air Ministry. He alleges that deliveries by contractors of new machines in quantities equal to or even above war consumption were continued well into the summer of this year, and were accompanied by the destruction of new machines, in addition to the scrapping of machines in current use at the time of the Armistice. The method of destruction, it is alleged, was to drench the machine with petrol—as much as 30 to 50 gallons being used to burn it. This sort of thing is said to have gone on daily in the occupied zone, not far from Cologne. He also purports to give facts about the " scandal " of engine deliveries since the Armistice, and alleges that many hundreds of thousands of pounds have been thrown away by the sheer inept folly of the Air Ministry. Again, he talks about deliveries of spare parts for obsolete engines in many thousands, long after the engines for which they were designed had passed out of service. As a matter of fact, there is not a single item which escapes his censorship, and we must say that he makes out a strong prima facie case for the enquiry he demands. But it seems to us that he weakens his own case by studiously refraining from saying where and when all these things occurred, except that he does in his first article say that the machines alleged to have been destroyed in the Cologne area were of the DeH. IX. type. Further than that, the charges are of a very general nature, and are such as anyone with a little inside knowledge, fortified with a good deal of the gossip which has been so rife all through the War period and since, might have brought. We do not say they are not true. Unfortunately, there is only too much reason to think that they rest on a very solid basis of fact, but that does not help very much towards bringing to book those responsible, unless the accuser can fortify his allegations with specific dates and names. Already " Argonaut " has been practically challenged by the Air Ministry to produce his proofs. Immediately on the publication of the first article, the Air Ministry, in an interview between one of its officials and a newspaper representative, said: " The statements are certainly untrue so far as the information of the 1412
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