At Southampton docks to meet him was his sister Barbara and together they journeyed to London to stay with Aunt Mary, their mother’s sister, at 87 Cadogan Place on the Knightsbridge/Chelsea borders of London. Barbara remembered Francis talked only of flying – so much so that within a week Aunt Mary joked that to keep up with him she too would have to take to the skies.
It didn’t take long in England for Francis to have two things on his mind: the record flight home and the fate of his fortune. Between the time he left New Zealand and arrived in London the New York stock market had crashed and the Great Slump had quickly spread to New Zealand. Francis’s fortune was made of the wrong sort of paper, mortgage slips from the banks, which he had taken out to buy land and build houses at the time when borrowing to build and sell made good business sense. Now the banks were reclaiming anything and everything they could get their hands on; Francis’s fortune had gone from being worth a lot in theory to a little in practice.
It was in these more modest circumstances that Francis went shopping for his aeroplane. The general aviation scene in England was booming, with new manufacturers spinning off existing ones, much like automobile manufacturers were doing. New airfields, new hire and charter companies and new flying schools were opening every month. Later, those of these that had not gone bust would consolidate but in 1930 Francis had a choice of six British light aeroplanes to buy and eight flying schools around London alone from which to complete his licence.
His most obvious choice would have been the Avro Avian biplane. After all, the Goodwin Chichester Aviation Co. in New Zealand had taken out the Avro sales agency and bought two of them to give joyriding thrills. More to the point, the Avian held the existing England to Australia record, flown two years earlier by the Australian ace Bert Hinkler in an amazing fifteen and a half days; it was this record that Francis was determined to break. He knew that he couldn’t beat Hinkler on level terms. Whereas he didn’t even have a licence, Hinkler had been a First World War ace with a Distinguished Service Medal and after the war was a test pilot for the same Avro company that made the Avian. He’d won two Britannia Cups and a gold medal from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale and even had an international nickname: ‘Hustlin’ Hinkler’. He’d had a trouble-free journey to Darwin, cutting the previous record in half. No wonder Francis felt a level playing field was not sufficiently sloping in his favour. A faster plane was needed.
Step forward the de Havilland DH.60 Moth. First flown in 1925 by Geoffrey de Havilland at his Stag Lane airfield and factory in north London, by 1929 it had become the Empire’s most accepted general-purpose light aircraft. It was still using the same Cirrus engine that Hinkler had used in his Avian. The Cirrus was a fine engine but, being based on First World War Renault engines, supplies were dependent on dwindling stockpiles. With a booming order book, Geoffrey de Havilland decided that his own engine, built in his own factory, was needed. The new engine was designed to be more powerful, lighter and much more reliable – and, of course, available – than the Cirrus. He called the engine ‘Gipsy’ and so the DH.60 Moth became the DH.60G Gipsy Moth.
The Gipsy Moth brochure; yours for £650.
When deliveries started in 1929, a Gipsy Moth could be bought for £650, a much better bargain than the alternative Westland Widgeon, Simmonds Spartan, Bristol Bulldog, ABC Robin or, indeed, the Avro Avian. Francis saw the Gipsy-engined Moth as his competitive advantage over Hinkler and the £650 asking price as just about affordable in his newly reduced circumstances.
But first he had to learn to fly – or rather continue from where he left off in New Zealand: he already had eighteen hours of dual instruction in his logbook. He chose Brooklands as his flying base and of the three schools there he chose the Brooklands School of Flying to take him over the line.
It is easy to agree with George Bolt that Francis was not a natural pilot – as, indeed, he was later to find that he was not a natural sailor. What he was, however, was a natural navigator, and then some. In the Brooklands School of Flying brochure the school answers its own question:
How Long Will It Take Me to Learn to Fly? The period occupied in taking the course varies with age and temperament. Some obtain their licence after as little as eight hours total flying; others take as long as fifteen hours; but it has been our experience that the average time is from ten to twelve hours.
Somehow Francis managed to take twenty-four hours of dual instruction before being allowed to fly solo. He had to add five hours at Brooklands to the eighteen already received in New Zealand before the great day, 13 August 1929, when he took off alone for a five-minute circuit of the airfield.
Brooklands School of Flying
I am keen to experience what Francis went through during those August days at Brooklands. When I was making sports/racing cars around the turn of the century one of my advisors was Roy Palmer, who ran a very successful marketing consultancy. I remember that he is a keen aviator of the vintage variety and call him for advice for my new venture, viz. writing this book.
As good luck would have it, Roy not only knows all about Gipsy Moths but actually owns one and a half of them. More than this, he is generous enough to put the whole one, G-AANL, at my disposal. Brooklands as it was in its Francis-era derring-do heyday is of course no more, the famous banked motor racing circuit mossing away and the infield now mostly the ultra-modern Mercedes Benz UK headquarters. The very fine Brooklands Museum still stands and thrives, and I’m especially grateful to the archivist there, Philip Clifford, for background and images about the Brooklands School of Flying and Brooklands airfield as it was.
White Waltham airfield near Maidenhead could be said to be the today’s Brooklands: its eclectic mix of vintage, aerobatic and home-built aircraft all flying off grass on London’s western doorstep – and just under Heathrow’s control zone – summons up a refreshingly professional amateur approach to going aloft. White Waltham completes the impression of a modern Brooklands with its wooden bungalow clubhouse, all Biggles and shillings, full of today’s The Few, and here I meet my instructor for the day and Roy’s own instructor, Bob Gibson.
I suggest to Bob: ‘I’m going to imagine you are a Mr C.M. Pickthorn, who had the patience to teach Francis how to fly. Also going to ask if you can imagine I’m the recently arrived from New Zealand Francis Chichester, with eighteen hours under my belt but not yet deemed solo material. And we are both going to take our lives in our hands as you give me-as-Francis a flying lesson.’
‘Of course,’ Bob replies, ‘and not just the flying lesson but the whole Gipsy Moth experience. But there’s a flaw in your plan.’
Moths at the ready at the Brooklands School of Flying
There normally is; I ask him which one this time.
‘Francis learned to fly in G-EBPR. That was Brooklands School of Flying’s Moth, but it was a Cirrus-engined Moth, not a Gipsy-engined Moth. Francis’s – and Roy’s – are Gipsy Moths. So we can’t be totally like for like – but there or thereabouts. You’ll certainly get the Moth experience.’
‘Ah. Well can you find me a Cirrus Moth?’ I ask.
‘No. There aren’t any Cirrus Moths left.’
‘How come?’
‘Well, they were of course pretty fragile, and the school ones would have crashed a lot, but the real reason was that the Gipsy engine was so much better. So if any old Cirrus-engined ones survived the crashes the owners all changed to Gipsies when the time came to renew the engines. But still … the plane’s the same and we can give you a good feeling of what it was like.’
We walk around the Moth as Bob explains the pre-flight checks. Close up the old biplane looks amazingly flimsy. We examine each nut and strut and bit of string. There aren’t that many of them and the glue you can’t see at all. Alarmingly, the wings swing back to ease hangar space – and the hinges are locked in place by a suspiciously simple-looking pin. I mention something about this being a Jesus pin – after the name given by the American flyers in Vietnam to the one bo
lt that held the rotors onto the Hueys. Bob must have seen me looking wistfully from the grass underneath us to the sky above.
‘Don’t worry,’ he reads my mind, ‘she’s actually a brand new airplane if you think about it. Just built to a very old design. Back when Chichester was flying, none of the steel was high tensile, now it all is. The glue back then really was glue, now it’s adhesive, just like on that Boeing up there.’ He looks up at a BA plane on final descent into Heathrow. ‘And the fabric’s not really fabric, more like some newfangled reinforced ripstop overlay. In layman’s terms.’
‘Layman sounds good.’
‘But apart from having to use all modern materials,’ Bob seems a bit wistful now, ‘everything else is period, the instruments, seats, screens. The only thing we’ve changed is the intercom, so we can hear each other a bit more easily. Back at the Brooklands School of Flying they would have had tubes you shouted into and hoped for the best. Instructing involved a lot of yelling, and that was when it was all going smoothly.’
Two other parts of the plane catch my eye. The air speed indicator is a wonderfully simple swing gauge on the port strut between the wings: the faster you fly, the more the needle is pushed back by the wind against the speed markings. Anything below 45 mph is in the red zone, a reminder that when flying the danger is not going quickly enough. Maximum on the gauge is 120 mph, by which time ‘the wings would have gone their own way’, as Bob reassuringly puts it.
The Gipsy Moth’s air speed indicator on the strut. Buckingham a long way down below, seemingly
Secondly – and much in the news that afternoon – is the pitot tube sticking out a few inches from the lower starboard wing. This ingenious bit of tubing feeds information on air speed and air pressure back to the instruments. And why much in the news? The air crash investigation into the Air France 447 Rio-Paris flight had just been published. As Bob says, ‘Even the most modern airliners and military jets use the same pitot/static system to provide air pressure information to their instruments. The only difference now is that the information is displayed on glass cockpit displays instead of dials with needles’. In this case the pitot tube malfunctioned, causing the air speed instruments in the Airbus cockpit to read too low. The scandal was that the pilots had been trained to fly computers, not aeroplanes: the aeroplane pilot reacts to slow speed by diving, in the sense that – perhaps counter-intuitively – speed is controlled by climbing and diving, while climbing and diving is controlled by speed, using the throttle. The Air France computer pilots reacted to the false slow speed reading by whacking on more throttle, thereby climbing and losing more speed and subsequently stalling – stalling all the way down into the Atlantic, with the loss of all 228 souls on board. And as even I know, they could always have double-checked the pitot tube air speed reading with the GPS and, realising the instrument error, have gone with the satellite information on the latter – not to mention common sense. And as even I know, too, if the stall warning alarm is shouting at you repeatedly, you do something about it. Shocking, really.
Getting in – and out – of the Gipsy Moth front seat is a real struggle gymnastically. I’m due to sit up there and I’m a big boy and it takes several attempts at contortionist choreography and yogic breathing for me to squeeze in. Francis was medium-built and wiry and a lot younger – and even he remarked about the ‘ingress egress bother of the ’plane’. I suggest that baling out in an emergency would be a challenge. Bob agrees, only pointing out that emergencies bring out the lithest in people. He also points out that when the Royal Air Force ordered their Tiger Moth trainers they insisted that, inter alia, the existing DH Moths’ wings be swept back to solve the problem.
The instruments are all original and pure Francis-era: an altimeter and air speed indicator fed by said pitot tube, a cross-level like a spirit level to keep the plane on an even keel and a compass. Above these are the engine instruments for rpm and oil temperature. There’s a chronometer for navigating. Added to the Brooklands spec are a modern radio and transponder for flying in controlled airspace, should the need arise.
‘Getting in – and out – of the Gipsy Moth front seat is a real struggle, gymnastically’. Instructor Bob Gibson, left, and your correspondent hanging on tight – and that’s still on the ground
Not much to go on, not too much to sit on…a Gipsy Moth cockpit
Time to start her up. Not the work of a moment. Before electric starters this was a two-person operation, one to stand in front of the engine and swing the prop eight times to prime the engine with fuel, the other to catch the engine on 1/4 inch of throttle when it fires up. The engine has two magnetos, basically on/off switches, and in view of the likelihood of disarming or decapitation, the person in charge of the operation is the prop swinger. ‘Contact on!’ or ‘Contact off!’ our protagonists shout to each other each time the prop is swung: ‘on’ means that the magnetos are on and the engine may burst into song once the magnetos have caught a spark. Later, in the Biggles bar, we try to work out how Francis managed to start his engine solo. He would have had to use chocks to stop Elijah (as he had named his Gipsy Moth at Brooklands, with a ceremonial bottle of brandy broken on the propeller boss) zooming off, and would have had to set the magnetos and throttle each time. Once it had fired he would have had to rush around, skewer himself into the cockpit and pull up the chocks using pre-arranged ropes. What is less clear is how he did it when Elijah became a seaplane. (Actually, once Elijah became a seaplane Francis observed naval tradition and renamed her Madame Elijah.) He would have had to stand in front of the engine on the port float (as the prop swings clockwise from the front) and somehow get over to the starboard float, all the while with her taxiing across the water, and somehow jump in from that float taking care to keep clear of the rotating prop. We were still trying to work out how he did it at closing time.
So the Gipsy engine starts, Bob runs her up to check that both magnetos are working on full power – 2,200 rpm – and off we taxi. We can’t see a thing ahead so we zigzag to the end of the runway, do more final checks and off we go. Bob suggests I hold on to the joystick and rest my feet on the pedals lightly to feel what he is doing. As soon as she starts to roll he moves the stick forward to bring the tail up and at about 45mph, with just a hint of back ’stick, she slowly lifts herself off and climbs away at 300 feet a minute. Progress to the skies is stately rather than startling. Outside it’s a lovely September day and soon the thermals are throwing us around a bit.
I actually had a pilot’s licence back in the days before inflation, family and yachts, and owned an eighth of a single-engined Piper Comanche, G-AZUL and, later, an eighth of a twin-engined Piper Aztec, rather gaily – as the vernacular evolved – registered G-AYBO. I had also bought a Tiger Moth flight simulator programme the week before today’s flight. All this explained, when Bob says the famous words ‘You have control’, why we don’t dive straight into the nearest haystack. Above all, in both senses, it is great to be piloting again.
It would be hard to imagine an easier plane to fly than the Gipsy Moth. Being out in the open must help as you can see and feel directly what happens with every control input. The inputs themselves need only to be tiny for the new/old stringbag to react: an inch or so on the ’stick to port is enough to initiate a turn, half an inch back pressure and the nose pops up over the horizon. This sensitivity is all very well but creates its own problems, very Francis-orientated ones: how to keep her straight and level when you need two hands for doing something else, such as working a sextant or even pouring a coffee or finding a pasty, as he had to do on the long flights. Try leaving her alone to fly herself and within two seconds she is turning or climbing or diving on her own; ditto taking your eyes off the horizon to look at a map. You can trim and balance a modern plane to hold her own for half a minute or so while you navigate; not so a vintage kite, as I must learn to call them.
Then again all this flying happens so slowly and so ensures a strong sense of safety: get something wrong or find yourse
lf lost and you could almost make a cup of tea, rethink and try again and not have gone too far up, down, sideways or forwards. The only quirk is that being relatively underpowered – by today’s standards – she stops climbing in the turn; in other words, when the wings are not horizontal, when turning, they lose most of their lift. In fact, unlike the Tiger Moth on the simulator, you can turn and you can climb but you cannot climb and turn at the same time; but you soon get used to that.
Bob takes me through a standard Francis one-hour replica flying lesson. We stall, at what seems strolling speed, and recover, without any drama and with nose down; we emergency land and make a perfect landing at 50 feet above a wheat field; we steep turn with rudder; we set her up for the cruise at 78 mph; we navigate by railway line; we figure-of-eight – and end up more or less where we started. Then we land, without flaps, there being none, being overtaken by a bicyclist pedalling uphill on a country lane on our final approach, or so it seems. Landing is the only remotely tricky part, and even that comes with the option of powering up and having another go. I’m sure that Mr Pickthorn would have told Francis what Bob tells me now: a good landing needs a good final approach, so the landing starts a minute before the wheels first bump off the grass. Half a dozen cracks at it should be enough.
So, it’s really hard to see why Francis struggled so much with learning to fly. In his first book, Solo to Sydney, he readily admits his lack of flying finesse and recalls some of Pickthorn’s fairly frantic comments to him:
Never Fear Page 6
