18 hours dual and 23 hours 30 minutes solo on Oxfords, plus a total of 9 hours 45 minutes on the Tutor.


* * * * *


We had been awarded our Wings on the Course at Cranwell and our tunics now proudly displayed to the world that we could actually fly aeroplanes. Central Flying School had taught me the elements of flying instruction, but flying an aeroplane and being a pilot are two different things. I sometimes think that eventually I could have taught an intelligent chimpanzee to take off, do a circuit and land, but that would not have made it a pilot. Many hours of not only handling the aircraft, but of coping with the things that happen in the air, particularly weather, but also navigation, safe flying in cloud and darkness and the ability to cope with a dozen different situations help to turn the flyer into a real pilot.


In my next posting I was to begin to learn to be a pilot. Handling the controls was something I loved, and becoming a flying instructor provided the most wonderful opportunity to get better and better at it, for not only have you to tell the pupil how to do things – you have to show him. It is no good talking about the perfect steep turn – you have to be able to do it. Hour after hour, the instructor is pushing out the patter and at the same time trying to demonstrate perfection, a routine which makes even the most modest flyer improve his handling skills. My posting as an instructor was to Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, where No. 2


Service Flying Training School was established, flying Oxfords in the training of pilots who would later fly twin or four engined aircraft. It was another permanent RAF unit, with permanent mess buildings and hangars but no concrete runways. The River Thames was about three miles to the south, and Oxford itself some twelve miles to the east. I still had my Vauxhall, and Margaret was still with her parents at Whitehouse Road, so I was able to get across to see her fairly often. I started to teach others to fly as a junior member (still a P/O) of ‘A’ Flight under the command of Squadron Leader Pat Tipping, a very pleasant New Zealander. My logbook showed a total of 217 hours 05 minutes of dual and solo flying when I first took off from Brize Norton on September 23rd 1940. In that total, I could lay claim to no more than 2 hours 35 minutes of dual and 3 hours 05 minutes of solo flying by night and it seems now, though perhaps I had no such doubts at the time, rather a flimsy basis of experience on which to teach others.


But when the weather is fair, flying experience comes fast to an instructor. On that first day I flew for more than three hours, with no less than four different young pupils, one after the other, hanging on my every word! By the end of the month, when I entered my hours in the usual monthly Summary in my logbook,


35


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