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When the day came for my first solo, my instructor said, ‘Now look, if you treat it very carefully you can do your first solo on my aeroplane.’ So I got out into the middle of the aerodrome and my prop stopped. Well, of course, the normal thing to do is to call for a mechanic to start your prop but with the impetuosity of youth I thought I’d start the prop myself. As I swung it, the aeroplane started moving forwards. So I dashed under the plane, tried to get in the seat but I couldn’t and I fell over. The tailplane hit my head and knocked me to the ground. I watched my instructor’s beautiful aeroplane run away from me. It swerved to the left and I ran after it but it gradually gained speed until it started to turn towards me. I fell over which was just as well because the aeroplane took off over my head and flew at about fifty feet until it crashed. In the meantime, my instructor was going absolutely mad. I had to go in front of my commanding officer who told me, ‘Pilots are cheap but aeroplanes are very, very expensive. You made an awful mess of things today.’ I thought I was going to be dismissed from the service and I held my head very low and said I was sorry. But he had a half smile on his face as he told me, ‘Well, all right. We’ll forget it this time!’
Stanley Walters learnt an important lesson during his first solo:
The instructor said, ‘See the nose?’ I looked at it. ‘See that little cap on the top of the nose? Remember to hold that on the horizon!’ Then he hopped out of the aeroplane and said, ‘She’s all yours! Take it off and fly yourself! But wait a minute! There’s another fellow there, he’s going off solo from another instructor. Let him do his circuit and landing first. As soon as he’s in the air, you take off. Just do one circuit and landing!’ ‘OK,’ I said.
The other fellow was a man called Day. He took off. I was thinking that a hell of a lot of pupils and instructors would be watching me because it was my first solo. ‘One circuit and landing be damned!’ I thought. ‘I’ll do a couple of loops, but they’re all watching Day now, so I’ll wait till he’s landed.’ So I took off and followed Day round to watch his landing – and I saw him stall from about fifteen feet, hit the ground, and burst into flames. He was killed on his first solo. All arrogance in me also died. I did exactly what I was told. I completed my circuit and landed.
Charles Chabot’s first solo went according to plan:
When I went solo for the first time – it seems completely ridiculous in present-day terms – I had had fifty minutes of instruction. But off I went. At one end of Brooklands Aerodrome was a pub – the Blue Boar. We knew that if we came in at 100 feet over the Blue Boar, we were in the right position to land. The sun was just rising above the horizon and, as I came in, the shadow of the Longhorn was away on the left and, as I came down, it began creeping in under the plane, so when the shadow was properly comfortable under the wings, I yanked my stick back and sat down with a perfect landing on the aerodrome. My instructor was delighted. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Off you go, Chabot. Take your ticket.’
‘Taking your ticket’ meant taking the pilot certificate test conducted by the Royal Aero Club. Donald Clappen recalls the examination:
So far as the Aero Club certificate was concerned, one had to do five figures of eight observed by two qualified pilots who acted as observers. These observers were usually two of the instructors from one of the other flying schools. At the end of each flight of five figures of eight, one had to land within fifty metres of a specified spot, which was where the observers were standing. Then, came the height test. One had to fly up to a height of fifty metres, cut off one’s engine and land again within fifty metres of the spot where the observers were standing. Often, if it looked as though the pupil was going to land too far away, the observers would walk to where they thought he would land. They wanted the pupil to pass, so that they could get back to their own job of teaching people to fly. I do not recall a single pupil failing to land within the specified distance.
Humphrey Leigh confirms that the pupils were not always rigorously examined:
There was one old boy, a captain, who was terribly ham-fisted. He smashed pretty well every aeroplane he got into. Eventually the time came for him to take his ticket. I remember the CO of the station seeing me standing on the tarmac, beckoning me over, and saying, ‘Leigh, go and watch Captain X get his ticket, And what’s more, see that he gets it!’ So I said, ‘Aye, aye, sir’, and went off. In due course, the old boy had to land near the mark – and I was the mark. I could see that he was going to be miles away, so I ran like a stag. And as his aeroplane came to a grinding halt, the old boy said, ‘Have I got it? Was it all right?’ ‘Yes, sir! Yes, sir! Yes, sir!’ I said, clapping like anything.
Once the pupil had taken his ticket, he usually went to an advanced training school, to prepare for flying in action. Reginald Fulljames followed this path:
I was selected for fighter pilot training and I was sent to the Advanced School of Flying at Gosport. One morning, I was surprised to hear that the commanding officer wanted to take me up. This shook me because you seldom had any dual control after you’d gone solo. The commanding officer was the famous Smith-Barry and I suppose he was using me as one of his early guinea pigs, trying out his new ideas.
Major Robert Smith-Barry revolutionized flying training from late 1916 onwards. He had noticed that flyers who arrived on the Western Front were often hesitant and diffident in their approach to flying. This approach, he reasoned, must have been learnt from the instructors, who viewed instructing as a dead-end job. Smith-Barry aimed to revitalize teaching. He insisted that all pupils under dual training should sit in the pilot’s seat in front of the full set of controls. He developed the ‘Gosport tube’, which enabled the instructor to communicate with the pupil during the flight. He believed that a pilot, having flown solo, needed to learn advanced manoeuvres such as sudden turns and the correct way to recover from a spin. Of all the dilemmas that a pilot could face, the spin was the most feared. If the airflow over the wings decreased to the point where the machine could no longer sustain flight, it would fall out of the air. No longer an aircraft, cheating the laws of nature, it became a spinning hulk of wood, metal, wires and cloth. Until 1916, there was no known method of recovering from a spin. Some pilots who spun their aircraft managed to recover by chance, but they could not explain what they had done. Reginald Fulljames:
Smith-Barry showed me, above all else, how to get out of a spin. Smith-Barry was undoubtedly a genius and his methods are the basis for modern flying training. He had been injured in France at the beginning of the war, when he had spun into the ground. After that, he intended to find a proper way of getting out of a spin, and when he had discovered the answer, he pressed the Air Ministry very hard to be allowed to teach this in the Royal Flying Corps. The confidence that I could get out of a spin saved my life when I was being chased by Baron von Richthofen. I went into a deliberate spin and I got away.
Ronald Sykes remembers the feeling of a spin:
It was the most sickening sensation. You were thrown violently to one side of the cockpit with a fierce blast of wind on one cheek. You had to switch off the engine and straighten everything – the control stick and the rudder. You usually didn’t come out of the spin quickly. You just had to put everything central and wait. Eventually you entered a nosedive and you pulled the stick back slightly and you were all right.
Smith-Barry argued that, in order for pupils to be able to practise manoeuvres such as these, the training schools needed a standard type of dual-training machine that was capable of performing them. In December 1916, he was placed in charge of the Gosport School of Flying. The aircraft that he chose as his advanced trainer was the Avro 504K. Frank Burslem encountered great difficulty flying an Avro:
I was a very slow pupil. I suppose I was a little bit dense. I took eight hours to go solo whereas the average was about three hours. My problem was psychological. I went up in an Avro and was put into a spin by the instructor. He told me what to do and how to get out of the spin but when I saw the world turning round on an axis directly below me, I absolutely froze on the controls and I couldn’t do anything. I was so fascinated watching the ground, getting lower and lower, that I couldn’t do anything at all. The instructor was swearing and cursing and he overcame the pressure I was putting on the controls and he got us out of the spin about 500 feet off the ground. The instructors thought I wasn’t fit to fly the faster machines – the single-seater fighters – so I was sent to fly heavier machines – two-seaters.
Smith-Barry’s teaching methods prepared pupils for the realities of combat flying. They also allowed slower pupils – like Burslem – to learn their limits before it was too late. For the pilots such as James Gascoyne who relished the possibilities that flying offered, the sky was the limit:
A loop comprises racing your engine, opening your engine full out, putting it into a slight dive to get full speed, then all you do is pull back the joystick, right back into your stomach, and the machine goes up, over, and then drops. As it drops, you switch off the engine and come smoothly out into a glide. They are usually done at a height of a thousand feet or more to give you time to recover in case you lose too much engine speed and the machine comes straight down.
Ronald Sykes remembers the thrill of the vertical bank:
It was the most delightful manoeuvre. You could just move your stick an inch or two over to the side and she would immediately turn over onto a wingtip. At the same time, you pulled the stick back into your stomach and the nose began to whip round the horizon. You also had to put on full left rudder because the engine tended to make the nose climb into the sky on a left turn and the left rudder kept it down.
Pilots took pleasure in trying to outdo each other and achieve what had not been achieved before. Frederick Powell came up with an idea that was very nearly his last:
One night I was lying in bed and I thought, ‘I’ll do something nobody else has ever done – tomorrow morning I will loop off the ground!’ My Bristol Bullet had a maximum speed of about seventy miles an hour but I thought that if I held it down just over the top of the grass until I was going flat out, then I could go up in a very big loop and when I got to the top I could pull the joystick into my tummy, whip the tail over and gravity plus the engine would pull me round. So next morning, I went off and tried it. I pulled up in the loop, flipped it – and realized I hadn’t enough room. I have a feeling that my life was saved by some sheep grazing at the far end of the airfield. They all started to run out star fashion away from me and I was so interested in watching them that I didn’t stiffen myself up. I went straight into the ground at about 150 mph. I shot through the front of the aircraft, my belt broke, I hit my head on the instrument board and was knocked out. My legs shot through the rotary engine. Another quarter of a turn and I would have lost both my legs. As it was, I finished with the engine in my crotch. The ground was hard and nothing had sunk more than a few inches into the earth. Everything was flattened like a pancake. My CO stopped everyone from running out because he thought I was going to be a nasty mess. So he strolled slowly across to the crash. When he got there, he found me singing. I was quite out of it but I was singing the latest song:
Sprinkle me with kisses,
A lot of lovely kisses,
If you want my love to grow …
While practising something new in his Sopwith Camel, Graham Donald cheated death in a manner that might make a believer of the sternest atheist:
As I was approaching the airfield at 6000 feet, I decided to try a new manoeuvre which might prove useful in combat. It was to be a half loop and then I would roll at the top and fly off in the opposite direction. I pulled her up into a neat half loop but I was going rather slowly and I was hanging upside down in the air. With an efficient safety belt that would have been no trouble at all – but our standard belts were a hundred per cent unsafe. Mine stretched a little and suddenly I dived clean through it and fell out of the cockpit. There was nothing between me and the ground. The first 2000 feet passed very quickly and terra firma looked damnably ‘firma’. As I fell, I began to hear my faithful little Camel somewhere nearby. Suddenly I fell back onto her. I was able to grip onto her top plane and that saved me from slithering straight through the propeller which was glistening beautifully in the evening sunshine. She was now diving noisily at about 140 mph. I was hanging onto her with my left hand and with one foot hooked into the cockpit, I managed to reach down with my other hand and I pulled the control stick backwards to pull her gently out of her dive. This was a mistake – she immediately went into the most appalling inverted spin. Even with two hands on the top plane, I was slipping. I had about 2500 feet left. Remembering that everything was inverted, I managed to put my right foot on the control stick and I pushed it forwards. The Camel stopped spinning in half a turn and went into a smooth glide but upside down. It was now easy to reach my hand down (or up) and pull her gently down and round into a normal glide. I grabbed the seat cushion which was obstructing the cockpit, chucked it over the side and sat back down. I was now at about 800 feet but in spite of the extraordinary battering she had received, my little Camel was flying perfectly. One or two of the wings were a bit loose but nothing was broken. I turned the engine off in case of strains so my approach was made in silence. I made an unusually good landing but there was no one there to applaud – every man-jack of the squadron had mysteriously disappeared. After a minute or so, heads began to appear all over the place – popping up like bunny rabbits from every hole. Apparently, when I had pressed my foot on the control stick, I’d also pressed both triggers and the entire airfield had been sprinkled with bullets. Very wisely, the ground crew dived as one man for the nearest ditch.
As well as learning how to fall back into an aircraft from a height of several thousand feet, pilots had to learn to make cross-country flights. Charles Chabot remembers a particularly popular method of navigation:
One wasn’t particularly instructed in the use of a compass and our map-reading technique was not very good. When we had to get from A to B, most of us used to fly by ‘Bradshaw’. That was the name of the railway guide. One simply followed the railway lines. It was the recognized way of getting about.
A pilot who ‘Bradshawed’ his way down to a seaside resort, like Archibald Yuille, might have an enjoyable day out:
We used to go to Brighton and fly along the seafront and very often below the level of the pier. Then we’d zoom up over the West Pier, down again, zoom up over the Palace Pier and down again. We’d swing round and fly inland looking as if we were going to fly in the windows of the hotels then we’d zoom up over the roofs. That gave us great amusement but the people of Brighton didn’t like it very much.
As the war progressed, pilots began to learn to fly at night. Archibald Yuille recalls the difficulties:
It’s very funny, night flying. You get a good horizon to fly against and you can see water clearly underneath you but of course you can’t pick out roads or railway lines. The main thing is to keep your eye on the horizon and not find yourself getting into a dive when you don’t mean to. You had no aids – you were up there all by yourself in the dark for two hours. Not everybody has the mentality to do that. One of the things one did was sing – quite unconsciously. You’d come down absolutely hoarse.
Once a pilot had received his training, he was assigned to a squadron on active service. He was immediately confronted by his greatest challenge. He had to adapt to the reality of aerial warfare – and he had to adapt quickly. Some pilots were simply inept and no amount of training could make a difference. Harold Wyllie, an observer with 6 Squadron, was enraged by such a man in April 1915. His diary records:
Clarke was dreadfully smashed here today. Ross Hume was pilot and somehow managed to side slip and nose dive to the ground. This is wrong. Ross Hume stalled his machine turning. He was a rotten pilot and should never have been allowed to carry a passenger. Clarke died at 11.50 pm without regaining consciousness, thank God. He was one of the best fellows that ever lived and a valuable life has been thrown away by sheer bad flying.
By 1916, so many pilots were being lost that their replacements were barely trained when they arrived at the front. Cecil Lewis, arriving at 3 Squadron, was one of these replacements:
When I got to France, I only had about twenty hours flying and I was posted to a BE2c squadron down on the Somme. The CO took one look at my logbook and said, ‘My God, it’s murder sending you chaps out with nothing on the logbook. You’d better put in a bit of time!’ So he gave me an aircraft and I walloped off to have a look at the lines, to get used to the French maps, all the things that were different. One had always heard, ‘Behind the lines, this side of the lines, the lines, the lines, the lines …’ But I hadn’t a clue as to what the lines looked like – really from the air – looked like …
John Boon was aware of the fate that awaited many of these schoolboys, like Lewis, who arrived to do a man’s job:
We used to see the young men coming in to the orderly office to receive their instructions as to where they had to go. Then the tenders from the squadrons came to the headquarters to pick up them up. You used to see these young fellows with their brand-new wings, brand-new uniform, brand-new Sam Browne belt. Everything was new and smart. Some of these boys didn’t last twenty-four hours.
On joining the Royal Flying Corps or Royal Naval Air Service, the men of the rank and file were treated very differently from the officers. These were the men – the riggers and fitters and other technicians – who would be responsible for keeping the aeroplanes flying. They joined as tradesmen, but they were trained as raw recruits. William Berry made an inauspicious start:
At my very first parade, the man next to me stood there with his boots all dusty. The sergeant said, ‘Man left and right of him, escort him to the guardroom!’ When we got him there, they made him turn out his pockets and I’ve never seen anything like it. He had nails sticking into bits of toffee, stubs of pencils – it was so funny that I burst out laughing. The corporal in charge of the guard looked at me and said, ‘Laughing on escort – worse crime than the prisoner’s! Get in there along with him!’ So by ten past two on my first day, I was confined to barracks.
The discipline meted out to the recruits was of a traditional military variety. Cecil King:
If we were such a superior corps we had to show it in discipline, especially when walking out. We were expected to set an example to everyone. That’s why all our instructors came from the Brigade of Guards. Our discipline had to be second to none.
George Eddington remembers how the discipline was imposed:
What struck me most was the absolute domination of the routine. From your feeding, to your sport, it was all routine. You were made to realize that you were there to do as you were told and not to ask questions. Even a simple thing like turning right or left had to be done just so. Squads were formed in fours, which meant a complicated movement of the feet. The food was not too good at all. You were only allowed out of camp with a pass and you were allowed once a week, until eleven o’clock. You were made to feel that you were nobody at all. You were a soldier first and last. The instructors were, without exception, warrant officers, Guardsmen. They felt that a new-fangled thing like the Flying Corps was a lot of poppycock, and a waste of good men, and they didn’t forget to let us know. We weren’t made to feel that we were technicians. We were soldiers in the King’s army: ‘You are not a superior breed! Get rid of that idea as quick as you like!’
William Berry had a favourite NCO:
I remember Corporal Newbolt. He could have been acting unpaid for all I know. He was six foot odd of brute strength and he would come and put his face by your cheek, within two or three inches – and he would yell at you, ‘Do you know Mrs Newbolt?’ ‘No, Corporal.’ ‘Well, you’ll jolly well know her son!’ He didn’t say ‘jolly’…
Cecil King discovered that the smallest act could breach army regulations:
I remember walking through Aldershot and it came on to rain. I was wearing an overcoat, and I turned the collar up. All of a sudden, I heard a man shouting behind me, ‘That man!’ and I looked round. It was a military policeman on a horse and he said, ‘Do you know you’re improperly dressed?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘How long have you been in the service?’ ‘Two months.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’ve turned your collar up without orders. You’ll put it down in the proper manner.’ I didn’t argue the point. I turned it down. But it made me wonder why we had to have an order to be permitted to stay dry.
For some of the men the discipline proved unbearable. Edgar Wooley remembers an uprising in the ranks:
Amongst ourselves we decided we just could not stand the methods our military tutors were adopting. They were acting as a brake on our ability to do our technical training. They were preventing us from making progress as wireless operators. So we rebelled. We refused to carry on our technical training whilst the military training and discipline were so exacting. Word soon got round to those higher up and officers came along to find out what the trouble was. These officers picked out six men of our section – the assumed ringleaders. They were sent to Headquarters at Farnborough and sentenced to twenty-eight days’ confinement. During their confinement, they were visited by a military parson who, on questioning one of them, was surprised by his intelligence and his desire to be a good soldier and a good wireless operator. The parson asked him why he was there. The soldier told him of the recruits’ dissatisfaction at the treatment they had received at the hands of their military trainers. As a result of this discussion, the parson made a report to certain officers and the matter was brought up in Parliament – why was the Royal Flying Corps attempting to institute Prussian military methods into the British army?
Ultimately the six prisoners were released and the sergeant major in charge of training was relieved. He was replaced by another sergeant who found us to be a very satisfactory, efficient body of recruits – much to his surprise – and he couldn’t understand why we had acted as we did unless there were justified reasons for it. He said, ‘I want you now to be good soldiers and if you do as you’re told and you continue to do your work properly, we shall get on very well together.’ And that’s exactly what we did. When he reluctantly left us, we made him a presentation. We found out that this hefty, jovial, soldierly sergeant was a big pipe smoker so we were only too pleased to give him a couple of pipes in a case. He was clearly very pleased – and surprised.
Irish charm made S. S. Saunders’ life a little easier:
Sergeant Major Waddington from the Guards was a gentleman off parade, but a bastard on parade. I found that I could say things to him which he took in a good way because I was the only Irishman, and he sort of took things from me. One day, he put me on the Awkward Squad, because I wasn’t properly shaved. The Awkward Squad was a squad which Sergeant Major Waddington took himself after lunch. We had to get on parade with our full kit including rifles and full pack. And he’d drill us like hell up and down there for about an hour. And then he’d dismiss us.
Well, we were issued with rifles which the Infantry had had for some time, and some of them had been lying in the mud for ages and practically rusted through. They were cleaned up and issued to us. Well, I had a rifle one day on the Awkward Squad and we were doing a drill where you pull back the bolt and hold the rifle in a certain position so that the inspecting officer can look down the barrel, and see that it’s properly clean. We had done this four or five times but Sergeant Major Waddington wasn’t satisfied. He said we weren’t all together and we weren’t making enough noise. So he shouted, ‘Pull the bloody thing back till you break it!’
So I pulled the bolt, and when I did, it came away in my hand and left the head in the rifle. I just remained in the same position I was in, with my right forearm parallel with the ground and the bolt in my hand. He looked at me and he said, ‘What the bloody hell’s wrong with you Saunders?’ And I said, ‘Nothing sir. I’ve obeyed the last order. I’ve broken the bloody thing.’ The other chaps were getting a side glance in and he chewed them up. He shouted, ‘Look to your front!’
He came over and he looked at me and I could just see a slight suspicion of a twinkle in his eye and he turned round to me and he said, ‘Get off this squad immediately. You’re too bloody awkward for the Awkward Squad. Dismiss!’ So I hadn’t to go on any more on the Awkward Squad, but the other fellows had to make up for it.
For William Hawkins of the Royal Naval Air Service, the end of a day’s basic training brought a soothing recreation:
When I was training at the Crystal Palace Depot, square bashing, route marching and rifle training finished at about 5.00 pm and then, in the evening, we had dancing. There was no one of the opposite sex so we had to dance with each other. We waltzed and we did the Boston two-step – the old-fashioned dances. It was quite a lot of fun, actually.
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