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Aviation History
1957
1957 - 1110.PDF
200 FLIGHT, 9 August 1957 LEAVES FROM A LOG-BOOK . . . and there were two obvious tyre-imprints—which, being measured,corresponded exactly to those of another Avro It was clear that I had been in collision, but I never saw or heard the other aircraft,and to this day don't know who the pilot was. Icing, incidentally, began to emerge as a secondary problem ofblind flying Not much was known about the phenomenon in those days; but in my Flight of four aircraft we once had eighteenforced landings in one day, all due to accumulation of ice in the carburettor; I had four myself. It was easy to foresee that icingand blind flying were likely to be closely related, so I started going up in appropriate weather to try to induce it, with a view tostudying the condition. On one occasion I succeeded in collecting a good dose of ice, stopped my engine, and glided in to land. I gotout of the aeroplane as fast as I could, picked the ice off the pro- peller, and found that it weighed about 1 lb 5 oz on each blade.Imagine the lack of balance—quite enough to break the propeller if such a weight were suddenly flung off one blade only. Nowonder pilots complained of their engines "going rough" in certain cloud conditions. By about 1931 I was an old hand at the C.F.S., having beenthere for nearly four years. I was very fond of aerobatics, and for three years I was lucky enough to have a place in the C.F.S. displayformation at Hendon. We used Moths, with a special petrol system to keep the engine running in the inverted position. We startedpractising in off-hours about six weeks before the great day, and I shall never forget the pleasure of doing an exact drill in the cooland still air of an early summer evening, with the sky uncluttered by Other aircraft, and in a spirit of mutual confidence—one had tohave absolute confidence in the vigilance and skill of one's part- ners, and this gave a kind of team warmth to the whole thing. Apart from the daily routine, I flew a great deal at week-ends,and thus found myself doing a lot of flying at club meetings up and down the country and on the Continent. Club flying in those days was great fun. I was, fortunately, ableto borrow various firms' demonstration aircraft, and I had two particular favourites—an exceptionally light and fast Moth,G-AALT, and an aeroplane called a Lincock [a Lynx-engined fighter built by Blackburn—Ed.], which was in a heavier and morehighly powered category. They both had invertible petrol systems, and were both well maintained for aerobatics. It was on the Mothin particular that I liked to try out new manoeuvres, and I believe that AALT was the first aeroplane ever to do a complete "outsideloop." I first did this at the Norwich Club, from the old Mouse- hold Heath Aerodrome. I also found it possible on that Moth,which had only 130 h.p., to do a manoeuvre which afterwards became quite popular on higher-powered machines, namely, a con-tinuous series of slow rolls, the path of which, taken altogether, made a complete circuit of the aerodrome. It was perfectly easyto do, but there was a trick in deliberately rolling in a controlled and exact curved path. I very nearly "bought it" on the Lincock at Sywell, theNorthampton Club headquarters. I was flying inverted at a couple of hundred feet when I felt, rather than heard, a sort ofclang, and found I couldn't roll off my back. I recalled that Dick Atcherley [now Air Marshal Sir Richard Atcherley], who haddemonstrated the Lincock in America, told me that it had quite a good rate of climb upside-down; so I pushed the stick forward,climbed to a sufficient height, and dived through a half loop to get right way up again. As I got on to a level keel, I again felt theclang, and out of the corner of my eye saw a cockpit floorboard move. I found that it was loose and that when the Lincock wasupside-down it could fall into a position where it prevented side- ways movement of the joystick and, therefore, the aileron move-ment necessary for banking or rolling. I was able to pin down the board with my parachute and go on with the show. Nobody onthe ground knew anything was wrong, of course, and I was con- A group at the Farman flying school, with the special Goliath aircraft fitted with enclosed cockpit. The author is second from the right and his instructor on the extreme right. gratulated for having added yet another manoeuvre to the repertory of aerobatics. I have had controls jam on five occasions—twice ailerons, twiceelevator, and once rudder. It happened in different ways, and each time the control got stuck in a position in which, using someunconventional method, I could safely land. The nastiest case I had was on an Avro. I had been doing some aerobatics with apupil of about 6ft 6in, and correspondingly very heavy, when I found the elevator controls rigidly stuck. I could push thestick forward, but not back from its level-flight position. Think- ing he would be awkward to pull out of a crash, I told mypupil to bale out; but he said that he was confident that I could "land the thing somehow." Under that challenge I did—but itmeant keeping a lot of engine on during landing, which in turn meant that, if we crashed, the probability of fire was strong.Anyway, we did land, and all ended well. The incident of the elevator sticking was due to a hand fire-extinguisher falling into the bottom of the cockpit. This had a repercussion of some interest. Shortly afterwards, two pilotspractising together in an identical Avro flew into the ground inverted, and were killed. An extinguisher, thrown clear of thecrash, showed a mark identical with that which mine had had. In the fatal case, the investigator could not find anything wrong.I suggested the fire-extinguisher, but he would have none of it —he had tried over and over again to jam the controls that way.I had a bet with him that I could reproduce the effect just by dropping an extinguisher "blind" into a cockpit. We went thereand then and opened up a hangar. I took a fire-extinguisher out of an Avro and dropped it without even looking, into the frontcockpit of another. The elevator was jammed! When we went into it, we found that every one of the investigators' tests had beendone on an aeroplane in the workshops—one without an engine, and consequently without the cable which drove one of the instru-ments. Without that cable, the extinguisher fell inoccuously. With it, it fell so as to jam the control. Generally speaking, theinvestigators were incredibly accurate, and it could be accepted that their findings, if stated positively, were correct.My last day in the R.A.F. was saddened for me. The Hendon practices had just begun, and I had agreed to fly in the formationuntil the proper man came back off leave. My last day was his also. He went up in the formation position in which I had beenflying, had a collision, and lost his life. (To be continued) ?>»» cornet) li»w«d .• Hoar. ' Type mi Ho. Pilot I *RHB> j Ckmm BMUKKS The entry in the author's log book recording his first solo under the hood. /4s. I. tu,i>~ it. I r/jt < \ -£...£. : 4 *„
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