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Aviation History
1957
1957 - 1079.PDF
FLIGHT, 2 August 1957 169 Leaves from a Log-book Memories of Earlier Service Days By PATRICK JOHNSON IN 1916 I was thirteen, and I had a brother in the Royal FlyingCorps. True to the lawless spirit of initiative in that epoch,he took me up in a B.E.2C. After that glorious experience—and it was glorious, for we flew over the skeleton of a Zeppelin destroyed in part by that very aeroplane a day or two earlier—nothing would stop me infesting aerodromes. I spent months of school holiday actually living on them. By 1918 I had about 80hours of flying in the log-book I meticulously kept; I had flown in and (unofficially) flown B.E.2C, Avro, F.E.2B, Handley Pageand D.H.9. And once I had been mildly crashed. In the doldrums of aviation between 1918 and 1925 I scrapedup a few five-bobs to spend with joy-riding outfits. In 1925, when the London Aeroplane Club was formed, I joined as MemberNo. 16 and was as frequent a pupil as my student's pocket-money would run. to at 30s per half-hour. I had a lot of fun learning tofly alongside such pupils as Mrs. Elliott-Lynn, Lady Bailey, Philip Lucas and Amy Johnson (who, I am sorry to say, was not a relative). This was on the original, almost primaeval, type of Moth, andwe flew at Stag Lane, which is now solid houses. It was a defect of that airfield—and one which I believe did much to ensure thatthe makers of the Moth knew all about undercarriage design—that its surface went up and down. There were points from which,sitting in an aeroplane, you couldn't see another one a couple of hundred yards away; and there was some choice as to whetherone landed or took off uphill or downhill. In those days, airmanship was an art. By this time I was utterly in love with the air. I think I lost myheart the first time I flew over cloud. Nowadays, millions of people a year fly in or over cloud and I'm sure that, save for the mostcynical, they cannot do so without a strong feeling that at such moments humanity reaches a spiritual summit. I also fell in lovewith the clouds themselves; but this is a love which was not reciprocated—clouds are enchanting from one aspect, threateningfrom another, and, generally speaking, nasty to be swallowed by. In love, twenty-three, qualified in my ground job, but too youngto practice it—that was me in 1926. So I joined the Royal Air Force. I was granted a short-service commission and sent to theflying training school at Netheravon. Here was assembled a miscellaneous and extraordinary cross-section of male humanity,to be turned into officers and pilots. For six months we spent hours sitting on chocks waiting our turn to be taught flying onMono Avros. The Mono was a curious aircraft. It was also an invaluable one, training pilots for many years. Its rotary enginewas about as unreliable as any life-sustaining apparatus has ever been. It ran on a little petrol and a lot of pure castor-oil—a lotsimply because the oil was continually spewed out of the engine for inhalation by the pilot. To this day, the smell of half burntcastor-oil gives- me a nervous, if pleasant, thrill. With the exception of Philip Lucas, who joined the R.A.F. withme, I was one up on the rest of the pupils, because I had flown before. Traditionally, people went solo after about eight hours ofdual instruction. Naturally enough, he and I were fit for solo in a very short time. We tried hard to appreciate this as an advan-tage, but it actually meant that we got in less flying than the others. In six months we did the standard 25 hours on Avros—and how we chafed! I had a marvellous instructor, called Sutcliffe, who at the timeof writing is still actively concerned with flying. With very few exceptions, every pupil's instructor is marvellous, and it was onlyin later years that I realized that mine really had been. It was his pleasure sometimes to fly very low across Salisbury Plain, and Iwell remember one incident, when we and another Avro pilot chose to fly alongside a train which was steaming from Andover. I can'tthink why, but after a little time the fireman started to bombard us with lumps of coal. In those days that sort of thing happened.There was reputed to be an incident in which an aeroplane was trundling alongside a train full of trippers down in Kent. The A PILOT who will be remembered for surpassing airmanship as long asthe fame of the R.A.F. lives on is W. E. P. Johnson, A.F.C., C.P.A., A.F.R.Ae.S. In printing these reminiscences of his (further instalmentsof which will follow) we are confident that they will appeal as strongly to all "new boys" of the right stamp as to the older hands who werefledged on 504s, Snipes, Gamecocks and the other fabulous biplanes of the twenties and thirties. In later years he was prominent in thedevelopment of jet propulsion; and, as European representative of the Solar Aircraft Company, he is still very much in the aeronautical picture. pilot noticed that the carriage windows were packed with interestedspectators, so he hopped over to the other side, whereupon the passengers crossed their compartments to the other windows. Byrepeating the process somewhat smartly he actually got such a roll on the train that its crew thought there was something wrong,and stopped it miles from anywhere, whereupon the merry fellow went on his way rejoicing. I have mentioned the unreliability of our engines. They wereindeed wonderful—wonderful and fearful—but the very devil to maintain, and forced landings caused by engine failure wereextremely common. My first was not due to that, but was occa- sioned by losing my way while flying from Gosport back toNetheravon on my first cross-country. I couldn't resist flying through some cloud, and when I popped out expecting to beover Salisbury, I couldn't recognize anything. The one piece of ground I couldn't see was the bit directly underneath, and I wasin fact vertically over Salisbury, and didn't know it. I went on flying, following the railway, and finally landed in a field. I askeda farmhand where I was, and he said "Gillingham." The only Gillingham I knew was in Kent, and I really couldn't see howby flying west from Gosport I had finished up east; nor could I think what had happened to the Thames Estuary. The thingsorted itself out when I learned of the Dorset Gillingham. Con- trary to all the rules, I got the farmhand to swing the propeller,and got back to Netheravon just before I would have been reported missing. The next step in our training was the Bristol Fighter. This was(and the sole example flying still is) a real aeroplane. I don't recall exactly what its performance was, but compared with the Avro(which did the world's flying donkey-work for a decade and a half) the Bristol Fighter was a racehorse. Moreover, it was extremelyreliable. The Biff, as it was called, was warm, firm, purred like a cosy cat, was as strong as an ox, and could be thrown round thesky. I well remember seeing three instructors flying three Biffs in formation, and their leader diving so low on to Netheravonaerodrome that his two companions literally flew into the ground, bounced about a hundred feet, still at full speed, and circled tonormal landings, having reunited in formation. Their rigging looked a bit out of date, but had held together. As good instructors,they afterwards said, simply and nonchalantly, "Just shows you what a Biff will take." This almost persuaded the pupils thatflying into the ground at 120 m.p.h. was done for the express purpose of demonstrating how safe it all was.The Bristol Fighter was safe enough but, looking back, I'm not so sure about the driver. On my first Biff cross-country—Nether-avon to Duxford—I flew back at the regulation 2,000ft 3 and justsouth of Newbury the engine stopped. The sight of a large stationary propeller blade looming over the radiator cap is notheartwarming. However, there was a drill to be followed—nose down, pick a field, glide to its leeward side, look round the cockpit,turn off petrol and switches, S-turn towards the field, final turn in, overshoot rather than undershoot ... at which point I realizedthat my field, instead of being reasonably large and still hundreds of feet below, was unreasonably small and quite near my under-carriage. I had picked the highest field in Wiltshire—940ft above sea-level, I believe. I violently side-slipped (obviously useless),and half-way across the little paddock found myself doing about 90 m.p.h. at ten feet; so I decided to go into the far hedge, wing-tipfirst (Biff wings were good shock-absorbers). Skidding like mad, I then realized that the hedge about to beused as arrester gear was a scraggy attenuation of sparse hawthorns and rusty barbed-wire, and that there was no ground on the farside. So I gathered up the aeroplane, heaved back the stick, and hopped the obstacle. Of course, the result was a complete stall—nose down about 60 deg. I stalled into an abyss, regained flying speed, glided three-quarters of a mile across the valley, was con- "By flying the Snipe I learned the real joy of aerobatics." [The Snipe depicted, with the author up-front, is one of the rare two-seaters.] I'Jf
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