Honouring pilots past

In a perfect world – the one where my employers lets me work on airscape whenever I feel like it, but keeps paying me regardless – I’ve long planned to move toward a monthly theme. In this perfect world, in fact, I’d already be doing just that.

A month to remember

I ‘committed’ (it’s a relative term) to the first couple of themes more than a year ago, and started preparing posts. But a major B-24 Liberator story ran into a bit of a wall in terms of research, so that kind of foundered. And I haven’t even started working on the other main subjects yet, beyond making notes in my head.

The reality is that I’m too busy right now to offer the required focus. So, because I’m never going to run out of subject matter, on a monthly basis or otherwise, I’m better off bringing what I’ve got into the light of day and continuing to write up whatever else catches my eye or takes my fancy as I go along. 

75 years on

That said, this IS the month that Mitch Peeke and the people he’s rallied to the cause will unveil their memorial to the crews of B-17s Heavenly Body and #44-6133. So there may be more than one WW2 bomber article in the coming weeks. 

And if you’re lucky enough to be in Kent, England on Saturday June 22nd, do make your way to Haven Allhallows Leisure Holiday Park to support the ceremony. With all the work Mitch has put in, I’m sure it will be a wonderful and moving occasion. 

I will be joining the festivities in spirit …by going flying. 

Wisdom from history

In amongst everything else, I am maintaining my spirits and proficiency with regular hops in the SportCub. As the more wintry weather permits, that means alternating sessions of circuits with short navigation flights. When the weather clears up a bit, I’m hoping the SportCub will have completed its work and I’ll be ready for a more complex beast with bigger ±G ratings and inverted fuel and oil systems. 

Last week I was reminded how glamorous flying is …for those on the ground!

No-one who flies regularly would believe the glamour myth for long. It doesn’t matter how many gold bars you have on your sleeve, getting up at 3.30am is always a triumph of willpower over instinct. Shuffling through security with your shoes in your hands and the personal contents of your suitcase on public display isn’t much better.

And while plenty of films about World War One’s Knights of the Sky confront death, I’m yet to see one that convincingly takes on the mind-numbing cold, the equally disabling hypoxia or the literal pucker-factor that comes from inhaling castor oil smoke for several hours a day.

My point is, I found myself falling back on what might be the oldest fighter pilot trick of them all the other day. No, not the volplane or the Immelmann Turn… Wearing pyjama pants under your flight gear to keep warm!

The Cub is pretty draughty on a cold winter’s morning, and flying is very glamorous.

(Only one of those statements is actually true.) 

Alcock and Brown

Finally, depending where you are in the world, today or tomorrow marks 100 years since Captain (RNAS) John William Alcock and Lieutenant (RFC) Arthur Whitten Brown clawed their way into a brooding sky over St.John’s, Newfoundland, and set course for Ireland.

The next 16 hours were far from easy. Having barely coaxed their heavily loaded Vickers Vimy into the air (and over the trees by the field) in the first place, the flight ranged from wave-top height to around 12,000 feet. Their generator failed, depriving them of radio contact, intercom communication and power for their heated flights suits. 

Deafened, drenched but determined

Next an exhaust pipe, metres from their heads in a Vimy, burst and they were exposed to the full bellow of a Rolls-Royce Eagle engine; the trim control was broken so Alcock had to fight the aircraft all the way to Ireland; and they were forced to fly through fog with their basic VMC instruments. Predictably, Alcock twice ended up in spiral dives that he only managed to recover when they broke clear above the hungry grey Atlantic waves. 

And after 9 hours of all that it started snowing heavily – icing up the wings, the instruments and the carburettors, Not to mention the two deafened, drenched but determined aviators.

Who could blame them when, at 8.40 am the following morning, they flopped into a bog in County Galway, Ireland and crawled out of the wreckage, unhurt and immensely grateful just to be back on terra semi-firma. 

It wasn’t the most elegant arrival… but on a par with Louis Blèriot’s arrival in England 10 years earlier, and every bit as monumental. 

Still, the large cash awards, civic receptions and knighthoods from the King that followed must have stood in stark contrast to the “glamour” of crossing the Atlantic by air! 

I wonder if they could hear a single thing anyone said to or about them? 

First across the Atlantic?

Of course, Alcock and Brown weren’t actually first to fly across the Atlantic. The US Navy had snatched that title less than two weeks earlier, when Lieutenant Commander Albert Cushing Read and his crew had arrived in Lisbon, Portugal from Newfoundland in the Curtiss NC-4. 

Admittedly, their flight had taken 19 days (26 hours, 46 minutes flight time) from NAS Rockaway beach, NY; island-hopped via Newfoundland and the Azores; and followed a line of 53 handily laid on Navy picket ships. But it was still the first aircraft to fly across that – or any – ocean. The crew was duly fêted in London, Paris and the USA.

On the other hand, Alcock and Brown had made the flight non stop, the first to achieve such a monumental feat. That gave them the edge in the patriotic PR frenzy that followed and England’s dented prestige was duly restored. 

Courage and sacrifice

Incredibly – almost inevitably – Sir John Alcock was dead within months. Having survived air combat over the Mediterranean, a double engine failure and ditching in the sea off Gallipoli, a year’s imprisonment by the Turks, and that epic trans-Atlantic flight, he crashed in fog near Rouen, France, on December 18th, 1919, while flying to an air exposition in Paris. 

Also a survivor of air combat and being a POW, Arthur Brown survived his flying partner by a further 20 years – long enough to endure another World War and the death of his only son, in action, flying a de Havilland Mosquito.

Brown served the first half of World War 2 as a Lieutenant Colonel in the British Home Guard and then as a navigation instructor with RAF Training Command. In failing health and broken hearted, he died from an accidental sleeping pill overdose in October 1948. 

On the shoulders of giants

There are still memorials to Alcock and Brown’s crazy-brave flight of 15/16 June 1919 at Galway, Manchester City airport and London-Heathrow; and it’s surprising how many people believe they were first to fly across the Atlantic, full stop (rather than non-stop).

 One hundred years later – whether you’re growling at your 3.30 alarm, putting your shoes back on for the sprint to the gate, or wearing pyjamas under your pants to stay warm, take a minute to salute Alcock and Brown.

They endured far more than any of us.

For aviation, not for glamour.