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Course No. 62 at Brize Norton began on May 6th 1941. It was an unusual one in so far as it had on it several young Czechoslovakian pupils who had been training on Tiger Moths at one of the nearby EFTS units. W/Cdr Larkin had a word with us about these Czechs, suggesting that it would be beneficial for all concerned if they could be taken in hand by one instructor rather than put, one by one, under several different teachers. The idea was that they could then discuss amongst themselves their progress and difficulties, if any, which could then be discussed with a single instructor. Volunteers were called for and I found myself with three Czech pupils, each one an individual character, each one a different prospect for an instructor. They were, in no particular order of merit or lack of it, Hanzl, Hadravek and Sotola. Hanzl was a bull of a chap, hefty, mature, slightly aggressive even as a pupil. Hadravek was another well-built six-footer, a shade quieter, but confident. Sotola was the really quiet one, a dark, somewhat slighter figure with somewhat less apparent confidence. I flew with them until the course ended on July 21st. Hanzl was the interesting one. He must have been 22 or 23 years old and he told me that the three of them had escaped from Czechoslovakia and had got through Austria into Switzerland and thence to Britain. He was no trouble to teach. From the first minutes in the Oxford he seemed able to carry out whatever manoeuvre I demonstrated as capably as I could do it myself. When we got to the point of learning to fly blind in cloud, I was busy explaining to Hanzl how the pilot must, before and not after entering cloud, transfer his attention to the instruments and concentrate on them, not on what could or could not be seen outside the aircraft.


‘I know’, said Hanzl, ‘I fly this little aeroplane.’ He pointed to the artificial horizon, we entered the cloud, and he flew perfectly. It is slightly terrifying to look back on those days and realise that there was no control whatsoever on flying in cloud – we used simply to find some suitable cloud and bash into it, regardless of whether six other pilots, instructors or pupils, had the same idea about the same bit of cloud cover. There was no radar on the ground to monitor what was going on above, and the Oxfords had no radio contact with the ground or with each other. It is surprising that we seemed to get away with no accidents – certainly none whilst I was around. Hadravek was a good average pupil, confident but not over-confident as Hanzl seemed at times to be. Sotola was more difficult to teach, partly because his English was not quite as good as that of the other two. I remember sending him for his first solo in the Oxford. In any aeroplane there are certain checks to be made before take-off and again before coming in to land. Obvious checks are, for instance, on the aircraft door or doors and on the pilot’s harness. Others are on engine controls – the mixture (petrol supply to the carburettors) in ‘rich’ position, the pitch of the propellers, if they happened to be variable pitch propellers, set at ‘fine’. The Oxford had one which was important, though all


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