On my twenty-first birthday we got engaged, before attending a dining-in at the Mess. Arranged by my course mates and Flight Sergeant Lohan to celebrate my coming-of-age it turned out to be an engagement celebration as well. So much for having nothing to do with women before completing pilot training!
Our Commanding Officer was Squadron Leader Doug Whyte—a superb individual who enjoyed the respect of everyone who ever met him.
He came to lecture us about the dangers of ‘crew-room bragging’, a real killer in any Air Force. With the aid of photographs taken of a fatal flying accident in the Thornhill Flying Training Area the previous year, the Squadron Leader pressed home his message to us. With our flying training about to commence he urged us all to exercise responsibility towards each other and never to brag or challenge others into unauthorised flying activities. The death of 9 SSU Officer Cadet Nahke had been the direct result of a crew-room bragger’s challenge to a tail-chase. In a steep turn, Nahke had probably entered the bragger’s slipstream and paid an awful price for his inexperience. The loss of a valuable aircraft and the unnecessary pain caused to a grieving family was simply too high a price to pay for sheer stupidity. The CO’s message was firmly embedded in all of us.
Two of our numbers were ‘scrubbed’ on the grounds of poor officer-potential and fourteen of us passed on to the BFS (Basic Flying School) phase. During the two weeks preceding BFS we had spent most of our free time in Provost cockpits learning the various routines and emergency drills that we were required to conduct blindfold. During this time we anxiously awaited news of who our personal flying instructors would be.
Basic Flying School
WE KNEW ALL OF THE instructors by sight and for weeks had heard the exciting sound of the Provosts on continuation training as instructors honed up their instructional skills.
One instructor had the reputation of being an absolute terroriser of student pilots, so we all feared being allocated to this strongly accented South African, Flight Lieutenant Mick McLaren. Murray Hofmeyr and I were the unlucky ones and everyone else breathed a sigh of relief.
The Percival Provost had replaced the Mk2 Harvards as the basic trainer and was quite different in many ways. The most important difference was that the Provost had side-by-side seating as opposed to the tandem arrangement of the Harvard. This permitted a Provost instructor to watch every movement his student made, which was not possible in the Harvard because the instructor’s instrument panel obstructed view of the front cockpit.
A single Leonides air-cooled, nine-cylinder radial engine powered the Provost’s three-bladed propeller. At sea level this engine developed 550 hp at 2,750 rpm Thornhill was 4,700 feet above sea level and the maximum power available at this level was reduced to about 450 hp, equating to the power developed by the Harvard’s Pratt and Whitney motor at the same height.
Whereas the Harvard had retractable main wheels, the Provost’s undercarriage was fixed, making an otherwise neat airframe look unsightly in flight. Apart from the cost of retractable wheels, the fixed undercarriage of the Provost prevented ab initio students from making the expensive error of landing with wheels up, as happened to many students flying aircraft with retractable gear.
The Harvard employed hydraulics to operate undercarriage, brakes and flaps. Toe pedals on the rudder controls activated the wheel brakes. However, there are penalties for using hydraulics. They incur high costs, high weight of hydraulic oil and the reservoir in which to house it, as well as hefty pipelines to deliver pressure to services with duplicated pipes to recover hydraulic fluid back to the oil reservoir.
The Provost designers opted for pneumatics to reduce cost and weight. By using compressed air there is only need for a single lightweight delivery line to each service point and a lightweight accumulator tank to store compressed air. But the advantages of using pneumatics presented difficulties to pilots insofar as control of brakes was concerned.
Wheel braking was effected by pulling on a lever, much like a vertically mounted bicycle brake lever affixed to the fighter-styled hand grip on the flight control column. The position of the rudder bar determined how the wheel brakes would respond. If, say, a little left rudder was applied, braking was mainly on the left wheel and less on the right. The differential increased progressively until full left rudder gave maximum braking on the left wheel only. With rudder bar set central, both wheels responded equally to the amount of air pressure applied by means of the brake lever.
Attainment of proficiency in handling brakes was of such importance that, before flying started, the instructors spent time with their students simply taxiing in and out of dispersals. The ground Staff revelled in watching brand-new students trying to control their machines, even drawing men off the line from other squadrons.
Every aircraft of any type exhibits different characteristics to others of its own kind, which is why many Air Forces allocate an aircraft to an individual pilot or crew. No brake lever on Provosts, whether student’s or instructor’s side, felt or acted the same. They varied from a spongy, smooth feel, which was best, to those sticky ones that would not yield to normal pressure and then snap to maximum braking with the slightest hint of added pressure. The instructors knew which aircraft had sticky brake levers and it was these that they preferred for initial taxi training. Once a student was proficient on the ground, the flying began.
Firing a cordite starter cartridge started the Provost engine. Raising a handle set on the floor between the seats did this. At its end was a primer button that injected fuel into the engine during the three revolutions given by the cartridge starter motor. Learning engine start-up, particularly when the engine was hot, was quite a business largely because of a tendency to over-prime and flood the cylinders. ‘Duck shooting’ was the term used by technicians when pilots fired more than two cartridges. Years later electric starter motors were introduced, making matters much easier.
The first hurdle in any student’s training is to get to his first solo flight. The Air Force insisted that a student had to be prepared for every possible error that he ‘might’ encounter when flying without the protection of an instructor. Apart from the need to take off and land proficiently, a student had to act instinctively and correctly in the event of an engine failure or if he stalled (flying too slowly to produce sufficient lift on the wings) at any stage of flight.
Full stall, if not corrected early enough results in the uncontrolled, downward spin that killed so many pilots during World War I. In those early days pilots did not understand that pulling back as hard as possible on the elevator control maintained the stalled condition and hence the spin. So far as I know, one pilot chose to limit the duration of his spinning death descent by pushing forward on his control column and, to his utter amazement, the spinning ceased and he was back in control of an aircraft that was flying normally again. Preparing for the fundamental control actions needed to recover from spins was bad on the stomach but it needed to be practised ad nauseam.