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Aviation History
1936
1936 - 0639.PDF
28o FLIGHT. MARCH 12, 1936. Private Topics of the Day Earning the Subsidy ON a good many occasions I have given one or two reasons why club pilots so often lose interest as soon as their licences have been obtained, and I have tried to suggest how this interest may be held. Although it is very nice for a club to obtain the subsidy, it is nicer still to obtain the sum for each licence renewal, and, in all honesty, a club's work under the subsidy scheme does not end with the mere mechanical production of uselessly licensed pilots. These pilots should be en couraged to remain in practice and to p:le up hours as far as their incomes permit. The subject has cropped up again in my mind after reading a certain club's monthly bulletin, in which it is stated quite clearly that most of last month's flying was instructional, and that very few licensed pilots did any flying at all. Now, it is no use blaming the members. Some of them may be bankrupt, and nothing will get them into the air, but the others merely find that fhing around does not amuse them or that the club itself has no attractions. Bored Pilots ADMITTEDLY, it is extremely difficult to prevent a • pilot with, say, ten hours of solo experience, from becoming bored. He cannot be allowed to go alone on cross-country trips, and he must usually be given a couple of rounds or so before he is even allowed to encircle the same old aerodrome by himself. As one who found life extremely tedious during that period, I can sympathise with the truants. Something must be done to keep them interested. At the time when my flying ennui was at full strength I was lucky enough to be a member of a club with an instructor who was filled with a positively religious fervour towards various little navigational and aerobatic points, and had, furthermore, just worked himself into a freuzy over the business of instrument flying. I took a little of every thing all at one?, and managed to while away the hours in such a way that I was quite surprised when the instruc tor said, "Take —MG to Puddlewick, Muddlewick, and back. Watch the revs." Life was very exciting, since I was forced to obtain my own met. reports, and I made that cross-country flight on the compass, refusing to take any comfort from the fact that an enormous landmark stretched between P. and M. I was a Navigator. As one who was seriously frightened by the Great Racer at Wembley, I don't take too kindly to aerobatics, though I am proud of my slipstream-hitting loops and my stalled turns, but there are lots of novices who can be interested in such things rather than in the more serious affair of getting about—for which, one imagines, the aeroplane was invented. In modern flying methods there is so much of extrava gant interest that it is difficult to imagine that anyone, could be bored. It is the instructor's job to see that his pupils do not lose heart. Cramming THERE are, of course, extremes of everything. A pupil can be so ignorant that one wonders at the training he has received, or he can be crammed with so much informa tion that he is unable to digest it. Let me quote two examples. When I had done a bare ten hours' flying I went up as a passenger with a pilot who had done fifty hours or more. He practised steep turns with me, and we discussed them in the air. He did not understand the fact that the elevators tightened the turn at steep angles, and that the rudder became some thing of an elevator. His turns were being made with almost full rudder and full elevator. Why the pilot did not get into trouble is something of a mystery. He is still alive. At about the same period I was given landing circuits by a new instructor, who, in the midst of a medium-steep turn, told me about the same problems, but he talked so fiuentlv about "top rudder" and "putting the controls in a spinning position'' that I understood nothing, and thought it all out for myself later on. I had, in fact and in ignorance, been doing just what my amateur pilot had been doing—but through clumsiness rather than ignor ance. Obviously, the complete novice must be told about the mure involved problems on the ground and not in the air. Out and Home TALKING about problems, there is one perfectly simple one which tends to defeat quite technically able people. Only a fortnight ago I was arguing with a sane and sensible individual about the effect of wind upon out-and- home speeds. He started the discussion by complaining that the Blank aircraft in last year's Blackfriars Cup race, over a triangular course, had failed to make the speed claimed as a maximum by its makers. During this race there was a 15 m.p.h. wind blowing, and it was only after sketching an exaggerated case that I could make my inter locutor see that the lap speed would naturally be lower than the actual air-speed—and lower in proportion to the slowness of the machine. My exaggerated case concerned a hundred-mile out-and- home course, a 100 m.p.h. machine, and the two condi tions of still air and a 50 m.p.h. wind blowing straight down the course. In still air the machine's average would be 100 m.p.h. ; in the high wind its average could not be higher than 75 rn.p.h. Work it out for yourself if you don't believe me! INDICATOR.
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