Fighter Heroes of WWI: The untold story of the brave and daring pioneer airmen of the Great War. Joshua Levine
any banking taught. So we were told to keep our turns absolutely flat, suicidal as it sounds. And after that you were allowed to struggle around the circuit. You sort of flew around the outside of the airfield and when you came back to where you started, you shut off the engine and landed. That was a circuit. And that’s how I learned to fly.
Another very basic machine used for training was the Boxkite. In this aircraft, the pupil was able to wrap his body around that of the instructor. Donald Bremner flew a Boxkite from Chingford in September 1915:
Boxkites were very queer old machines with a 50-horse-power Gnome engine. They had practically no instruments – just a rev counter. There was a petrol tap and a joystick and a rudder bar. The joystick was alongside the pilot and came up from the right, across in front at a bit of an angle. There was a little wicker seat, bolted to the lower wing. The instructor sat in that and you sat behind him – not strapped in at all – you just put your legs round his waist and hung on round his shoulders. When he took the machine up, you leant your right arm round his shoulder, and caught hold of the joystick. You both had your hands on it and that’s how you learnt to use it. After he’d taken you round a bit, you were then allowed to taxi the machine around the aerodrome using the rudder bar. Without taking off. Then the most heroic thing happened. You changed places with the instructor. He couldn’t reach the rudder bar. All he could do was put his hand on the joystick round your shoulder. And together you flew off. When he thought you were ready – or perhaps when he’d had enough – you were allowed to do hops. You took the machine up on your own and flew about ten or fifteen yards and then put the machine down again. When you’d done enough of that, you started doing circuits.
The Boxkite might have been basic, but its slow speed and limited climb allowed Humphrey Leigh to perform a feat quite beyond any modern aircraft:
My Boxkite was on the far side of Hendon Aerodrome. A mechanic started up the engine and said ‘Give me a lift to the other end of the aerodrome.’ I said, ‘All right,’ and he stood on one of the skids and held onto the frame. I started taxiing across the field. ‘No!’ he said, ‘Let her go!’ So I told him to hold on tight and I took off and landed on the other side of the aerodrome. He was a very brave chap – stood firm, held on and didn’t falter at all.
As the Royal Flying Corps began to justify its presence on the Western Front in the autumn of 1914, it increased the scope of its flying training. The Central Flying School at Upavon was expanded and several civilian flying schools (including Brooklands) were purchased. Most importantly, the Royal Flying Corps began to teach pilots to fly from scratch. Young men no longer had to pay for their own tuition – although those that joined the reserve squadrons continued to do so. The training aircraft of choice, remembered by Donald Bremner, was the relatively advanced Maurice Farman Biplane:
The Maurice Farman Longhorn was a big, clumsy aeroplane but rather pleasant to fly. It was a pusher, so you were sitting out in front of the engine in a nice comfortable seat and you weren’t looking straight down onto the ground like you were in a Boxkite. And it had an airspeed indicator.
Gerald Livock also preferred the Maurice Farman to the Boxkite:
I flew a Maurice Farman at Hendon. Oh, it was terrific. Magnificent. We didn’t have altimeters so I don’t know what height we went to, probably 2000 feet, and circled round Hendon. I’d only ever been up about 300 feet in my Boxkite. One felt like a God, looking down on these poor mortals below. One almost forgot to be frightened.
The Maurice Farman came in two versions – the Longhorn and the Shorthorn. The Longhorn was so called because of its pronounced outriggers to a forward elevator, giving it the appearance of a breed of cattle. Both aircraft were ungainly structures. Sixteen wooden struts joined the upper and lower wings together and they were interwoven with such a tangle of piano wires that it was said you could safely cage a canary inside. Nevertheless, they constituted a great leap forward for pupils as they were capable of dual-control flying – in other words the pupil and the instructor sat one in front of the other, each with his own set of controls. This meant, in theory, that pupils were able to learn in far greater safety. Although, as Eric Furlong discovered, theory and practice did not always overlap:
My application to join the Royal Flying Corps was finally accepted in the middle of 1917. I was posted to the flying training station at Harlaxton in Lincolnshire. I didn’t tell them at first that I’d already learned to fly in 1914. I thought that I would learn more if I kept quiet. Whereas in 1914, all my training had been done on solo machines, in 1917, the system was dual training with the instructor in the other seat. Well, the instructor realized on my first flight that I knew something about flying so he told me to take control. He didn’t like the way I turned using the rudder only, as I’d been taught. By 1917, training had progressed to proper banked turns. So he wrenched the controls out of my hand and said, ‘This is what I want! Do it like this, you see?’ and when we got to the next corner, he wrenched it out of my hands again and when we got to the last corner, I left it to him again. And then I just sat there and watched as we came gliding in. Wallop. We slapped into the ground and smashed the machine to smithers. He looked at me and said, ‘What did you do that for?’ I said, ‘I didn’t touch it!’ He said, ‘Neither did I!’ He thought I had control of the aeroplane and I thought he had control. That was my first landing in a Maurice Farman Longhorn.
In the early days, as Frederick Powell remembers, communication between instructor and pupil was difficult:
The instructor sat behind me in a dual-control Maurice Farman and he flew the machine while I lightly put my hands on the controls. We had no intercom in those days – so the conversation was shouting over the noise of a rattling engine. It was difficult to hear. Sign language came in handy. The sign I used most was the two-fingered salute.
Take-off and landing both presented difficulties for the pupil. Landing, argues Laurie Field, posed the greater challenge:
Landing was the most difficult thing of all because it’s the one thing that mattered! If you made a mistake in the air it didn’t matter – if you made a mistake in landing, you were in trouble. The knack of the landing is that when you come down, you’ve got your gliding height, your engine is off. You gradually pull your nose up as you lose flying speed, it stalls your aeroplane and the perfect landing is to have the wheels and the tail skid hit the ground together. This happened once in every twenty times. A bad landing is when you pull your nose up too early and you’re too far off the ground and your plane drops. If it drops sufficiently badly, your undercarriage is gone.
Reginald Fulljames was wary of taking off:
I was more anxious about taking off than landing because you were entirely dependent upon your engine and if the engine coughed or spluttered as you took off, you had very little chance of avoiding a crash. Whereas if the engine failed at two or three thousand feet, I had every confidence that I could land the aircraft somewhere. And in those days – according to my logbook – one in every five or six flights ended up in some sort of engine failure which necessitated a forced landing.
If a pilot did have to carry out a forced landing shortly after take off, then Brooklands was not the place to do it, as S. S. Saunders recalls:
One corner of Brooklands happened to be a sewage farm. This caused quite a lot of trouble with some of the boys because if they hadn’t climbed up sufficiently high and then had engine failure, they just came down in it. Everyone was warned to avoid it because if they didn’t … well … everyone avoided them …
Once dual-control training had become the accepted method of training, the first ‘solo’ flight became a critical event for every pupil. Vernon Coombs made his first solo by accident:
I was terribly anxious to fly solo and after I’d done one hour and thirty-five minutes dual, my instructor jumped out of the machine and shouted something at me. I thought he’d said, ‘Take it up!’ so I turned the machine round and I took it up. After I’d landed, he tore strips off me. ‘What the hell do you mean doing that?’ ‘You told me to take it up,’ I said. ‘No, I didn’t, he said, ‘I told you to take it in!’
F. D. Silwood failed to make it off the ground:
When