Gaining An R.A.F Pilots Brevet In WW II

[Ian Burgess-Barber]

The Engine Restarts

This from Brian Abraham in 2009:
On the Military thread "Gaining An R.A.F Pilots Brevet In WW11" page 20, post 397. ED. This happened on a Halifax.

During the day of an Operation we would take our aircraft up on an air test to give all the equipment on board a thorough workout. On one occasion I asked Bill, my Yorkshire Flight Engineer, to feather one of the engines so that I could practice some three engine flying. A rotating propellor, without power, causes enormous drag on the aircraft, so the blades of the propellor of the "dead" engine are turned electrically, so that the leading edge is presented to the airstream, This is called "feathering" as in rowing, when the blades of the oar are turned in similar fashion so that they do not cause drag in the water. We always carried out air tests at an altitude of 5,000ft. or more and it was just as well as when Bill pressed the button of the Port outer engine (The engines are numbered from 1 to 4 looking from the tail to the nose, so the Port outer was No.1). and "Bingo" ...all four engines promptly feathered themselves and, of course, stopped. Bill, the unflappable Yorkshireman , said "Bloody Quiet up here ", leaned forward and pressed the same button and all four engines unfeathered themselves. On the post mortem, later, it was found that a drop of solder from some electrical work above had neatly fused all four circuits together.

You couldn't make it up - plus the positioning of feathering buttons was often an "afterthought" - one decorated Mosquito pilot described his aircraft's cockpit as "an ergonomic slum" but, of course there was a war on and 'elf & safety' was not even a concept in those times.

Ian BB