it decelerated, with the rudder and any necessary touch on the footbrakes. We were doing nicely. The Harvard was on the ground and slowing down quite happily when, quite suddenly, without warning and for no reason at all, Brodie stood hard on both his brake pedals. In these dual-control aircraft, controls are duplicated in the two separate cockpits for instructor and pupil, so I too had brake pedals. But I could only use them to apply more brake, not to take it off.


The Harvard tipped gently forward on to its nose, the engine stopped because the propeller had obviously hit the ground, and we hung there on our harness straps feeling extremely stupid until the ground crew pulled our tail down and pushed us off the flarepath.


I had to make a written report on the accident and I remember concluding it with the words: ‘This was an occurrence about which I was unable to do anything except regret it.’ Yes, pupils could do daft things. Thornhill’s landing ground was some 2,000 yards across in any direction. It had no runways, so any part of the great field could be used for take-offs and landings. Nevertheless, time after time one would experience an approach to land made by a pupil when there was, perhaps, just one single aircraft on the ground which had already landed. Quite inexorably the pupil would steer straight for it. You tend to fly in the direction you have your eyes on, and there was always the fatal attraction of this one stationary aircraft when there was bags of space all around it. The usual thing was for the instructor to let the pupil carry on until it became obvious even to him what he was doing, then to take over the controls if necessary, open the throttle with a quiet ‘Bad luck – just missed!’ and go round again. When pupils came in to land having forgotten to lower the undercarriage, which happened often enough, again a quiet ‘I’d really rather like to use this aeroplane tomorrow!’ normally brought the desired result. That made them think about what they’d done wrong rather than just being told, and it helped to get it stuck in their minds for the future.


The one pupil I found most impressive at Thornhill was a tall, bronzed and handsome young Australian I am going, for the purposes of this narrative, to call just ‘K’ He was an excellent pupil pilot, possibly the best I had had since the days of my Czech pupil Hanzl at Brize Norton. I have mentioned earlier that there is a dangerous time in a pilot’s training when he is beginning to handle the aircraft controls with both confidence and some skill, but before he really has had enough experience of the awkward things that can happen when least expected. It is usually when his logbook is showing around 250 to 300 hours that this phase is encountered. Confidence based on so little flying can trap the pilot into carelessness – taking off without the last final check that there is no other aircraft coming in to land over the top of you; ‘formating’ closer than your skill justifies; not keeping a lookout


65


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