accelerated, striking the revolving propellers in front of them. The props were made of wood and easily damaged, so this stopped the flying until the state of the ground improved.


My first real excitement came with my fourth batch of pupils, Lofthouse, Jones, Clay, Brown and Dalgliesh, whose instruction with me started on January 17th 1941. By this time I had over 400 hours in my logbook and was feeling pretty confident and even a bit clever. 300 to 400 hours is still a dangerous period for a pilot. You feel you can make your aircraft sit up and beg, and, with instructing being what it is, you really have learned to handle the controls well, simply because that it what you are doing every minute you are at them. It takes a few hundred more hours to have met with a few of the difficulties and tricky situations which every pilot eventually faces and it was one such situation which, on the night of April 17th 1941, nearly ended my flying (or any other) career. But let me first get back to one of those pupils on the course which began in mid-January and lasted till the end of April 1941. By this time the LACs had become Cadets and Cadet Jones is one I remember well. Pupils displayed different skills at different periods as their courses progressed. Some were natural flyers, taking to handling an aircraft as quickly as they must have learned to drive on the road, and to these the air was a natural environment, not something strange or difficult to cope with. There were very few who might have been described, in an official assessment, as Exceptional. Most were Average. Just a few were definitely Below Average. And one or two were impossible, which needs some explanation in so far as any pupil being taught to fly an Oxford at an SFTS like Brize Norton had obviously passed through his initial flying training at an EFTS. But being a pilot involves more than simply handling aircraft controls.


Cadet Jones was good at the controls. I had no trouble with him on take-offs and landings, on medium or steep turns, on climbing and gliding, or even on instrument flying take-offs and precautionary landings. He could fly. But he had one blind spot, so significant that he was never going to turn from a flyer into a pilot. To Jones, the air was an alien element, bearing no relation to anything else he knew about and as soon as he was airborne he was completely lost. I could fly him within a few hundred feet of his home aerodrome and, if we had been a few miles away from it for even the shortest time, he would fail to recognise it. I could take him over the route for a short cross-country flight before taking off, painstakingly going over the features on the map which would stand out a mile to anyone observing them from above – clearly discernible railway lines, the River Thames just to the south of Brize Norton, a wooded copse marked on the Ordnance Survey 1/4" map we used – but once we were airborne, none of them seemed to Jones to bear any relation to where we were or to the direction in which we were flying.


37


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