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Air Experience with the Air Training Corps

The first time I ever flew was in a Percival Proctor from RAF Acklington in Northumberland, during an Air Training Corps weekend camp. I remember being so excited when detailed for the trip that I went and sat in the aircraft right through lunchtime, until the pilot eventually wandered over from the mess and climbed in.

Many years later I myself was taking an ATC cadet up for an air experience flight. When the tiny little lad in the back cockpit of the Chipmunk eventually got his microphone switched on, he cried

“Ooh Sir, Ooh Sir! I ain't never been flying before, Sir!”.

 It took me back immediately to that day at Acklington so long before, and my own very first flight. The wheel had come full circle!

Actually I do not remember very much about the trip, which was down the coast to Tynemouth and back, except for the novel and startling sight of a formation of P51 Mustangs going past - underneath us!

About ten or eleven more air experience flights with the ATC followed at different airfields. I can't find a log of them now.

One was in an Avro Anson. It was a Mark 1 which can be recognised in photographs by having a lower roof than later marks, a continuous Perspex window all down the fuselage, and close cowled Cheetah engines with bulges over the cylinder heads. I think it had fixed pitch propellers. Some had their already modest performance hampered by a gun turret. However, as far as ATC cadets were concerned, the main thing was that the undercarriage was not hydraulically operated, but had to be wound up and down by hand. It took 140 turns of the handle. For short flights it was often left down, at the cost of about 25 knots airspeed, unless there were any ATC cadets on board who could be given this tedious chore. Happily this time the pilot did leave it down.

Another flight was in an Avro York from RAF Dishforth. There were comfortably furnished versions for VIPs like Churchill to fly about in, but this particular aircraft was a cargo-carrying version and had no seats at all in the cabin, just a bare metal floor with lashing rings There was nowhere for us to strap in so we cadets just ran up and down the empty cabin which must have been thirty or forty feet long. None of us had parachutes, needless to say. So much for flight safety rules and regulations, if any! The York was developed from the Lancaster bomber, but had a high wing, and from its windows you could see the flaps and the huge undercarriage operating just outside, which was about the only interesting thing about the flight.

I think all my other air experience flights were in the DH89 Dominie. This aeroplane was more or less just a camouflaged Dragon Rapide, a rather pretty civil twin -engined biplane taken over by the RAF for communications and radio operator training. Despite its butterfly like appearance, it was a competent aircraft and had once been a competitor of the Anson for the reconnaissance role and anti-submarine role.

One weekend we were at RAF Milfield, a few miles from Berwick on Tweed. The airfield operated Typhoons, which did air to air firing off the coast. One of the fighter pilots, a Free French Air Force officer, took us flying in the station's Dominie, with an RAF pilot squeezed in beside him in the cramped front cockpit. As we taxied out, we knocked over a marker flag on a post at the side of the perimeter track. We stopped and the RAF chap got out to have a look, in case this had torn the fabric under the wing tip. It hadn't, but as he climbed back in he explained to us “Sorry about that, chaps. The pilot has never flown one of these before.”

Thank you very much. There are some things one does not wish to know. Especially when we got airborne and proceeded to beat up the Air Traffic Control tower.

At that time in the last years of the war, senior ATC cadets were sometimes employed to help pilots ferrying an operational aircraft from one airfield to another, to save having to find a full crew. The cadet would work the hydraulic hand pumps if necessary, or switching things on and off that he could not reach. I believe that several cadets were killed in crashes while on this duty.

It was while at a weekend camp that one of our officers asked me what I was going to do after leaving school. I sad that my ambition was to go the RAF College at Cranwell, and learn to fly, but I didn't think I was good enough to be selected.

 He said: “You will never know if you don't apply in the first place. Go ahead and try.”

This is very sound advice whatever you do in life. You will never win if you don't apply in the first place.

( “Congratulations. Our computer has picked out your name at random. You have won a cadetship at Cranwell. All you have to do to claim it is to send £1,000 administration fee and your bank details to the following address in Nigeria -)--”)

So I did apply.

And I did go to Cranwell.

Otherwise this book might have been about civil engineering or accountancy instead of flying. And you wouldn't be reading it.

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