A single Leonides air-cooled, nine-cylinder radial engine powered the Provost’s three-bladed propeller. At sea level this engine developed 550 hp at 2,750 rpm Thornhill was 4,700 feet above sea level and the maximum power available at this level was reduced to about 450 hp, equating to the power developed by the Harvard’s Pratt and Whitney motor at the same height.
Whereas the Harvard had retractable main wheels, the Provost’s undercarriage was fixed, making an otherwise neat airframe look unsightly in flight. Apart from the cost of retractable wheels, the fixed undercarriage of the Provost prevented ab initio students from making the expensive error of landing with wheels up, as happened to many students flying aircraft with retractable gear.
The Harvard employed hydraulics to operate undercarriage, brakes and flaps. Toe pedals on the rudder controls activated the wheel brakes. However, there are penalties for using hydraulics. They incur high costs, high weight of hydraulic oil and the reservoir in which to house it, as well as hefty pipelines to deliver pressure to services with duplicated pipes to recover hydraulic fluid back to the oil reservoir.
The Provost designers opted for pneumatics to reduce cost and weight. By using compressed air there is only need for a single lightweight delivery line to each service point and a lightweight accumulator tank to store compressed air. But the advantages of using pneumatics presented difficulties to pilots insofar as control of brakes was concerned.
Wheel braking was effected by pulling on a lever, much like a vertically mounted bicycle brake lever affixed to the fighter-styled hand grip on the flight control column. The position of the rudder bar determined how the wheel brakes would respond. If, say, a little left rudder was applied, braking was mainly on the left wheel and less on the right. The differential increased progressively until full left rudder gave maximum braking on the left wheel only. With rudder bar set central, both wheels responded equally to the amount of air pressure applied by means of the brake lever.
Attainment of proficiency in handling brakes was of such importance that, before flying started, the instructors spent time with their students simply taxiing in and out of dispersals. The ground Staff revelled in watching brand-new students trying to control their machines, even drawing men off the line from other squadrons.
Every aircraft of any type exhibits different characteristics to others of its own kind, which is why many Air Forces allocate an aircraft to an individual pilot or crew. No brake lever on Provosts, whether student’s or instructor’s side, felt or acted the same. They varied from a spongy, smooth feel, which was best, to those sticky ones that would not yield to normal pressure and then snap to maximum braking with the slightest hint of added pressure. The instructors knew which aircraft had sticky brake levers and it was these that they preferred for initial taxi training. Once a student was proficient on the ground, the flying began.
Firing a cordite starter cartridge started the Provost engine. Raising a handle set on the floor between the seats did this. At its end was a primer button that injected fuel into the engine during the three revolutions given by the cartridge starter motor. Learning engine start-up, particularly when the engine was hot, was quite a business largely because of a tendency to over-prime and flood the cylinders. ‘Duck shooting’ was the term used by technicians when pilots fired more than two cartridges. Years later electric starter motors were introduced, making matters much easier.
The first hurdle in any student’s training is to get to his first solo flight. The Air Force insisted that a student had to be prepared for every possible error that he ‘might’ encounter when flying without the protection of an instructor. Apart from the need to take off and land proficiently, a student had to act instinctively and correctly in the event of an engine failure or if he stalled (flying too slowly to produce sufficient lift on the wings) at any stage of flight.
Instructors seated: F/O Saunders, Flt Lt McLaren, Flt Lt Edwards, Sqn Ldr Whyte (CO), F/O Myburgh, F/O Hudson and F/O Bradnick.
Early morning preparation of Provosts at Thornhill, 1957—for the day’s flying.
Full stall, if not corrected early enough results in the uncontrolled, downward spin that killed so many pilots during World War I. In those early days pilots did not understand that pulling back as hard as possible on the elevator control maintained the stalled condition and hence the spin. So far as I know, one pilot chose to limit the duration of his spinning death descent by pushing forward on his control column and, to his utter amazement, the spinning ceased and he was back in control of an aircraft that was flying normally again. Preparing for the fundamental control actions needed to recover from spins was bad on the stomach but it needed to be practised ad nauseam.
From the very first flight, many, many spinning and incipient spin (the first stage of spinning) recoveries were practised, together with simulated forced landings. Limited aerobatics also acquainted the student with the sensations of ‘G’ and inverted flight. Most students returned from their flights feeling pretty ill. I remember only too clearly how the combination of fuel vapour and the flick-turn of every spin manoeuvre made me feel sick, causing my instructor to regularly ask me if I was all right to continue.
Harvards.
Murray Hofmeyr (Hoffy) could not understand why I was not having a Tough time with Mick McLaren because he was going through absolute hell. We soon learned why. Mick McLaren established that Hoffy, who hailed from Mossel Bay in South Africa, could neither ride a bicycle nor drive a car, yet here he was learning to fly a 450 hp machine. No wonder he was struggling under the toughest of our instructors. None of us had been aware of this but the course was instructed to have Hoffy both riding and driving within a week. Determined to protect one of our number, we had Hoffy ready on time and his flying difficulties immediately diminished.
I did not find the glamour in flying that I had dreamed of. It was hard work, stressful and made one feel bloody awful. This changed somewhat on 22 May when my flying time totalled thirteen hours and twenty-five minutes. I had radioed the Control Tower reporting being down wind for a roller landing when Mick McLaren transmitted again to say we would be making a full-stop landing.
When I had pulled of the runway to conduct routine post-landing checks, Mick McLaren called the Tower and asked for a fire jeep to collect him. With this he unstrapped and climbed out onto the wing with his parachute still on. There he turned back to secure the seat straps and said to me, “Well done Petter-Bowyer, you are on your own. Taxi back to runway 13—use my callsign—once around the circuit—I will see you back at the Squadron.” He unplugged the pigtail lead that connected his mask microphone and earphones to the radio intercom, and disappeared from sight.
Murray Hofmeyer.
PB in dispersals after first solo.
I experienced no sense of euphoria or achievement until I was in the air. The empty seat next to me emphasised the fact that I had reached an important milestone. Suddenly I was enjoying what I was doing. On final approach for landing I could see the fire jeep near the runway threshold and knew Mick McLaren was watching me closely. I did not let him down. I made the smoothest of landings.
A little earlier our Squadron Commander, Flight Lieutenant Ken Edwards, had sent John Barnes solo with thirty minutes less flying time than me. Only Flight Lieutenants Ken Edwards and Mick McLaren were qualified to send students solo. This was a distinct advantage to their own students because, when other instructors decided that their students were ready, one of these two senior instructors had to conduct the solo test; an added strain on any student trying to make it past his first hurdle.
By the time the last solo flight had been flown our numbers had reduced to twelve, two having been scrubbed for not possessing pilot qualities. But now came the solo party!
Wing Commander Archie Wilson had just taken over from Squadron Leader Whyte as Commanding Officer at Thornhill. He dropped in on our party some time after it had started. Since none of us was used to alcohol, we were already pretty tipsy on the champagn
e we had been drinking liberally as we toasted each other with nonsensical speeches. In consequence I can only recall two events.
One was Gordon Wright offering the Wing Commander a drink and, having handed it to him, putting his arm around the new CO’s neck before loudly welcoming him to Thornhill. Gordon, oblivious to the furious look on the Wing Commander’s face, pressed on with his welcoming statement. Fortunately, he did not resist Flight Lieutenant Edward’s not-so-gentle removal of his arm from around the CO’s neck. The second memory is of later in the evening. I was standing on top of a table next to an open window playing my piano accordion when I decided to sneak a pee through the open window. This didn’t work out too well! I lost my balance and fell headlong through the window into the dark night.
For a while flying became very pleasant because aerobatics and some low flying gave breathing space between the ongoing spinning, forced landings and never-ending circuits and landings. For every two flights with one’s instructor, there was a solo. The stress had subsided and stomachs had become used to the sensations of flight and the stench of fuel. But ahead of us was the next, and by all accounts, most challenging hurdle—instrument flying.
For instrument-flying training, many aircraft employed an arrangement of canvas screens set around a pilot to prevent him from peeping outside the cockpit. Such an arrangement with side-by-side seating was dangerous because it would blank off an instructor’s vision on the port side of the aircraft, thereby limiting his ability to keep a good lookout for other aircraft.
The Provost’s designers overcame the problem with a unique solution. They fitted a robust, amber screen that resided, out of view, between the instrument panel and the engine firewall. For instrument-flight training it was drawn up and locked in place to cover the whole forward windscreen. Swivelled amber panels that came up with the main screen covered the side panels. Finally, sliding panels on the canopy catered for lateral vision. When all screens were in place the instructor continued to have complete freedom of vision though the world appeared to him as if wearing yellow sunglasses.
The student wore a pair of heavy goggles, such as those used by motorbike riders; but a clear vision lens was replaced by one of blue Perspex. Within the cockpit everything looked like the blue moonlight scene of an old movie but the amber screen became ivory black. Only the sun could be seen though this arrangement, which was so effective that direct viewing of the sun was quite safe.
For the first fifteen minutes or so ‘under the hood’ I suffered a high level of claustrophobia. The combination of tight parachute and seat straps, a tight-fitting oxygen mask and large, tight-fitting goggles in a small world of blue, made me battle for breath. However, by the time my instructor had taxied the long distance to the runway, I had acclimatised and was quite settled.
In the learning phases, Instrument Flying (IF) was every bit as difficult as I had expected, particularly in the small blue world devoid of any external references. From the outset I suffered from vertigo which most pilots experience in varying degrees. I was badly affected by this problem; and it never improved throughout my flying days. I simply had to believe that my instruments were right and accept that my senses were wrong. It took a lot of effort and absolute faith in the instruments to master the weakness.
Once I had become reasonably proficient on a full panel of flight instruments and had started to gain confidence, Mick McLaren covered the primary instrument with a plastic stick-on vehicle licence disc holder. Loss of the artificial horizon introduced a new and infinitely more difficult dimension to flight control, but again, practice made this progressively easier. Then a second disc was applied to remove the directional indicator from view, compounding the difficulties because the magnetic compass was awkward to read and was subject to a host of errors, even in straight and level flight.
In the latter part of every flight, my instructor would take over control and put the aircraft through a series of harsh manoeuvres to confuse my understanding of what the aircraft was doing. I tried to use sunlight moving through the cockpit from ever-changing directions, but this confused me more than it helped. Mick McLaren would then say, “You have control” which meant I had to get the aircraft back into straight and level flight in the shortest time possible. Each flight then concluded with a limited panel let-down on the Non-Directional Beacon (NDB) that then flowed into a radar talk-down to landing on a full panel of instruments.
Full panel flying seemed easy compared to limited panel flying, which constituted most of the time spent on IF. A spell of bad weather with eight-eighths cloud (no blue sky) gave opportunity to fly without the amber screen and blue goggles. I could not believe how easy it was to fly instruments under these conditions, but then it was back to the world of blue for many flights to come.
One morning my instructor lined up on the runway for a standard instrument take-off. As I powered up and released the brakes, he began criticising me and kept thrusting his finger at the directional indicator. When I eased the aircraft off the ground, I lost heading a bit—for which he cursed me in a manner I had not known before. For the entire flight I was given hell for everything I did and the names I was called would not pass censorship. My whole world seemed to fall apart as I battled to satisfy my instructor’s non-stop demands, so it was a great relief to get back on the ground.
As Flight Lieutenant McLaren and I were walking back to the crew room he asked, “What went wrong with you today?” I could not answer and dared not look at him because I was too close to tears. He obviously saw the quiver on my chin and said, “Tomorrow will be better. Have a cup of tea, then come and see me in my office for debriefing.”
The next morning I was horrified to see the Flight Authorisation Book had me down for IF with Flight Lieutenant Edwards, our OC I immediately came to the conclusion that this was a scrub check. When the time came, I was called to his office for a pre-flight briefing, but all he said was “Go and pre-flight the aircraft and get yourself strapped in. I will be with you shortly.”
When Ken Edwards climbed into his seat I could not get over the size of the man. His left arm was against mine whereas my instructor’s arm was always clear. He started the engine and commenced taxiing to the runway before telling me to relax. “Take this as just another IF flight”, he said. From then on he only told me what he wanted me to do next. The unusual attitudes I was asked to recover from were so much easier than Mick McLaren’s. The routine NDB and radar letdown were fine and we were back on the ground in less than the usual hour. As we taxied back to dispersals Ken Edwards said, “Well done, you have passed your instrument-rating test." I was over the moon.
I had had absolutely no idea that this had been a rating test or that my instructor had deliberately set me up for it. By baiting me continuously the previous day, Flight Lieutenant McLaren had satisfied himself that I would not fall to pieces under duress, so he was quite sure I would fly a good test.
It was great to be the first of my course to gain a White Card instrument rating. Some of my fellow students struggled with instrument flying and our number had reduced to ten students by the time the last IF test was flown. For the two weeks between my test and the last student passing his, I was flying two solo sorties for every one flown with my instructor. Flying was now becoming really enjoyable!
Ronnie Thompson.
One of the students who failed to make it through the IF phase was Ronnie Thompson. He was very depressed and embarrassed by his failure. However, upon his return to civilian life, he followed his passion for wildlife and became a game warden with Rhodesian National Parks. In a career that continues today, Ronnie proved himself to be a top-line ranger and an enthusiastic promoter of wildlife. Over the years he has featured in many wide-ranging wildlife topics on radio, TV and press.
Having achieved instrument flight proficiency, it was time to move on to night flying, which was great. The fairyland of coloured lights covering Gwelo town and Thornhill reminded me of the 1947 visit to Rhodesia by King George VI,
Queen Elizabeth and the two princesses. For that royal visit Salisbury had been transformed into a dream world of coloured lights, with thousands of flags and portraits of the Royal Family. The colours, sights and sensations of the occasion are indelibly printed in my mind and night flying always induces recall of that special occasion.
Daytime navigation commenced at the same time as night flying. Now, after many years of flying and having flown with many civilian-trained pilots, I look back and recognise the excellence of Air Force instruction given from day one. Simple matters such as looking over one’s shoulder to ensure a town or other landmark was in the right relative position for one’s heading to next destination may seem obvious, but this insured against misreading the compass or Directional Indicator. Typical and sometimes deadly errors of steering, say, 315 degrees instead of 135 degrees, are thus avoided.
Initially our navigation was conducted on 1:1,000,000-scale maps that, by the nature of their small scale, provide limited topographical information when compared to the abundance of visible features along every flight path. Though this made map-reading for students difficult, it also helped to ensure that maps were read sensibly. Too often man-made features such as roads, railways, bridges, power lines and water storage dams appearing on our maps printed some years earlier were either no longer in use, had altered course or could not be seen at all. There were also many clearly visible landmarks that were not shown at all. So the need to ignore all but God-made natural features was repeatedly drummed into us.
Ever-improving navigational aids, which have become commonplace for present-day pilots, did not exist in Rhodesia in the 1950s. Non-Directional Beacons (NDBs) sited at a few main Airfields were only reliable (when they worked) close to their locations. So reading the ground with one’s Mk1 eyeballs and using map, clock and compass correctly was essential. The ability to identify correctly those riverlines drawn on our maps and interpret ground contouring and high features accurately, particularly at low level, became one of the hallmarks of Rhodesian Air Force pilot proficiency in the years to come.
Winds of Destruction Page 5
