Fighter Heroes of WWI: The untold story of the brave and daring pioneer airmen of the Great War

Another very basic machine used for training was the Boxkite. In this aircraft, the pupil was able to wrap his body around that of the instructor. Donald Bremner flew a Boxkite from Chingford in September 1915:

Boxkites were very queer old machines with a 50-horse-power Gnome engine. They had practically no instruments – just a rev counter. There was a petrol tap and a joystick and a rudder bar. The joystick was alongside the pilot and came up from the right, across in front at a bit of an angle. There was a little wicker seat, bolted to the lower wing. The instructor sat in that and you sat behind him – not strapped in at all – you just put your legs round his waist and hung on round his shoulders. When he took the machine up, you leant your right arm round his shoulder, and caught hold of the joystick. You both had your hands on it and that’s how you learnt to use it. After he’d taken you round a bit, you were then allowed to taxi the machine around the aerodrome using the rudder bar. Without taking off. Then the most heroic thing happened. You changed places with the instructor. He couldn’t reach the rudder bar. All he could do was put his hand on the joystick round your shoulder. And together you flew off. When he thought you were ready – or perhaps when he’d had enough – you were allowed to do hops. You took the machine up on your own and flew about ten or fifteen yards and then put the machine down again. When you’d done enough of that, you started doing circuits.

The Boxkite might have been basic, but its slow speed and limited climb allowed Humphrey Leigh to perform a feat quite beyond any modern aircraft:

My Boxkite was on the far side of Hendon Aerodrome. A mechanic started up the engine and said ‘Give me a lift to the other end of the aerodrome.’ I said, ‘All right,’ and he stood on one of the skids and held onto the frame. I started taxiing across the field. ‘No!’ he said, ‘Let her go!’ So I told him to hold on tight and I took off and landed on the other side of the aerodrome. He was a very brave chap – stood firm, held on and didn’t falter at all.

As the Royal Flying Corps began to justify its presence on the Western Front in the autumn of 1914, it increased the scope of its flying training. The Central Flying School at Upavon was expanded and several civilian flying schools (including Brooklands) were purchased. Most importantly, the Royal Flying Corps began to teach pilots to fly from scratch. Young men no longer had to pay for their own tuition – although those that joined the reserve squadrons continued to do so. The training aircraft of choice, remembered by Donald Bremner, was the relatively advanced Maurice Farman Biplane:

The Maurice Farman Longhorn was a big, clumsy aeroplane but rather pleasant to fly. It was a pusher, so you were sitting out in front of the engine in a nice comfortable seat and you weren’t looking straight down onto the ground like you were in a Boxkite. And it had an airspeed indicator.

Gerald Livock also preferred the Maurice Farman to the Boxkite:

I flew a Maurice Farman at Hendon. Oh, it was terrific. Magnificent. We didn’t have altimeters so I don’t know what height we went to, probably 2000 feet, and circled round Hendon. I’d only ever been up about 300 feet in my Boxkite. One felt like a God, looking down on these poor mortals below. One almost forgot to be frightened.

The Maurice Farman came in two versions – the Longhorn and the Shorthorn. The Longhorn was so called because of its pronounced outriggers to a forward elevator, giving it the appearance of a breed of cattle. Both aircraft were ungainly structures. Sixteen wooden struts joined the upper and lower wings together and they were interwoven with such a tangle of piano wires that it was said you could safely cage a canary inside. Nevertheless, they constituted a great leap forward for pupils as they were capable of dual-control flying – in other words the pupil and the instructor sat one in front of the other, each with his own set of controls. This meant, in theory, that pupils were able to learn in far greater safety. Although, as Eric Furlong discovered, theory and practice did not always overlap:

My application to join the Royal Flying Corps was finally accepted in the middle of 1917. I was posted to the flying training station at Harlaxton in Lincolnshire. I didn’t tell them at first that I’d already learned to fly in 1914. I thought that I would learn more if I kept quiet. Whereas in 1914, all my training had been done on solo machines, in 1917, the system was dual training with the instructor in the other seat. Well, the instructor realized on my first flight that I knew something about flying so he told me to take control. He didn’t like the way I turned using the rudder only, as I’d been taught. By 1917, training had progressed to proper banked turns. So he wrenched the controls out of my hand and said, ‘This is what I want! Do it like this, you see?’ and when we got to the next corner, he wrenched it out of my hands again and when we got to the last corner, I left it to him again. And then I just sat there and watched as we came gliding in. Wallop. We slapped into the ground and smashed the machine to smithers. He looked at me and said, ‘What did you do that for?’ I said, ‘I didn’t touch it!’ He said, ‘Neither did I!’ He thought I had control of the aeroplane and I thought he had control. That was my first landing in a Maurice Farman Longhorn.

In the early days, as Frederick Powell remembers, communication between instructor and pupil was difficult:

The instructor sat behind me in a dual-control Maurice Farman and he flew the machine while I lightly put my hands on the controls. We had no intercom in those days – so the conversation was shouting over the noise of a rattling engine. It was difficult to hear. Sign language came in handy. The sign I used most was the two-fingered salute.

Take-off and landing both presented difficulties for the pupil. Landing, argues Laurie Field, posed the greater challenge:

Landing was the most difficult thing of all because it’s the one thing that mattered! If you made a mistake in the air it didn’t matter – if you made a mistake in landing, you were in trouble. The knack of the landing is that when you come down, you’ve got your gliding height, your engine is off. You gradually pull your nose up as you lose flying speed, it stalls your aeroplane and the perfect landing is to have the wheels and the tail skid hit the ground together. This happened once in every twenty times. A bad landing is when you pull your nose up too early and you’re too far off the ground and your plane drops. If it drops sufficiently badly, your undercarriage is gone.

Reginald Fulljames was wary of taking off:

I was more anxious about taking off than landing because you were entirely dependent upon your engine and if the engine coughed or spluttered as you took off, you had very little chance of avoiding a crash. Whereas if the engine failed at two or three thousand feet, I had every confidence that I could land the aircraft somewhere. And in those days – according to my logbook – one in every five or six flights ended up in some sort of engine failure which necessitated a forced landing.

If a pilot did have to carry out a forced landing shortly after take off, then Brooklands was not the place to do it, as S. S. Saunders recalls:

One corner of Brooklands happened to be a sewage farm. This caused quite a lot of trouble with some of the boys because if they hadn’t climbed up sufficiently high and then had engine failure, they just came down in it. Everyone was warned to avoid it because if they didn’t … well … everyone avoided them …

Once dual-control training had become the accepted method of training, the first ‘solo’ flight became a critical event for every pupil. Vernon Coombs made his first solo by accident:

I was terribly anxious to fly solo and after I’d done one hour and thirty-five minutes dual, my instructor jumped out of the machine and shouted something at me. I thought he’d said, ‘Take it up!’ so I turned the machine round and I took it up. After I’d landed, he tore strips off me. ‘What the hell do you mean doing that?’ ‘You told me to take it up,’ I said. ‘No, I didn’t, he said, ‘I told you to take it in!’

F. D. Silwood failed to make it off the ground:

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.