Reply to Brian
I first flew the Halifax at 1663 Heavy Conversion Unit , Rufforth, Yorks. The month was May 1943 and I flew the Mk. V Halifax. The original Halifax had suffered a bad design fault in as much as the rounded leading edges of the rear stabilisers did not provide enough area to recover in a turning dive and a "Rudder stall", usually fatal, occurred. Eventually the Mk11A was produced with square rudders and this was effective in curing the fault. When I started the course I had a total of 543 hours of which 200 were my training hours in the USA.
I found the Halifax a very easy aircraft to fly but extremely heavy on the controls and an hour's circuits and bumps was a real hard physical exercise. It was built like the proverbial brick "outhouse" and had armour plating everywhere you can imagine, This made it very popular with the crews as it was capable of absorbing very heavy punishment. It was flyable on two engines providing that airspeeds were rigidly observed and weights were crirical. If you had already released your bombload and were returning to base you would be able to fly there and land on two engines , once again, critical speeds were,,er,,,critical. Once the wheels were down then you were committed to land.
At the Con. Unit I had 14 hrs Dual (1.20 night) and 29 hrs. First Pilot (7,10 night). I was posted to 51 Sqdn. Snaith, Yorks whe re I did some circuits and bumps on the Mk.V and made my first Heavy Op to Hamburg on July 24th. 1943. The comparison between the Halifax and the Lanc. was rather like that between the Spitfire and the Hurricane. There is no doubt that the Lanc could carry the greatest load, further and higher than the Halifax but the Halifax could take the greatest punishment and was less vulnerable to the lighter calibre guns. Later in my career I was to fly the Lancaster a great deal at The Empire Flying School, Hullavington where I was a "Tutor" and it was a delight to fly to the limit and far more manoeuverable than the Halifax.....but !
When I finished my uncharacteristic long tour, Oct.1942 until Jan 28th. 1944, I had a total of 733 hours so I flew 190 hours during my Operational period.,roughly the same amount of training that I had put in during my stay in Georgia USA.
I hope that this answers your question satisfactorily, Brian. It was not the normal run of things as I had a longer training in the USA than those who had trained elsewhere and I had operated on Mosquito's (9 Ops.) before asking to go to heavies. All the best, Regle
Last edited by regle; 8th Feb 2009 at 08:08.