̉ne or two more....
I get your point, Union Jack, but being very open minded I have read from many books and articles including the Koran, The New and Old Testaments and have learned much from all of them. I have always respected the right of the other person's point of view and found myself sympathising many times when I should'nt have been doing so.
Here are a few more thumbnail sketches of aircraft that I flew. I see that I flew a little German monoplane called a Bucker 181 that we used for communications whenI was at the EFS, I flew with a Sqdn. Ldr. Primavesi in one and also with a Wing Cdr. Dobree-Bell for familiarisation flights in early 1947. I remember it as a comfortable ,low wing, side by side ,two seater monoplane with a delightful performance. Losing count, by now but I see that No.29 on my list was my introduction to the jet age in my one and only flight in a Gloster Meteor 3 in the early part of 1947. I was airborne for an hour and remember that it scared me stiff by the phenomenal rate of climb compared with previous aircraft. I found it fairly easy to fly and very responsive on the controls but confined myself to keeping very close to the aerodrome as it was scary the distance it covered in a few minutes and I would have hated to make a fool of myself by getting lost so did a circuit or two and got out of it feeling very different somehow to what I had felt before about the jet age.
The next one on my list could not have been more different to the Meteor . It is marked in my log book as a Percival Prentice (prototype) so I assume that we had it at Hullavington as one of the tasks there was the writing of "Pilots Notes" for various aeroplanes as they came into the RAF. I flew it with a Wing Cdr. Chater for under an hour in May of '47 and remember absolutely nothing about it or the Wing Cdr. Two days later I was flying a Miles Martinet trainer which was also a prototype with a certain P/O Steff-Langston . On the 20th.May 1947 I flew an Oxford with S/Ldr. Cosby, the 22nd. a Harvard with Air Marshall Hampson and on the 28th. of May 1947 , I made my last flight in the RAF in the prototype of the brand new Vickers Viking Air liner which had been given to us at Hullavington to test and to comment on. I flew with a Wing Commander Foster and I remember how impressed we both were with the sheer luxury of the interior compared with what we had been used to since I joined the RAF in October 1940. It even had a considerable improvement on the old Elsan which we duly christened with great gusto ! I had flown 32 types of aeroplane ( I did'nt count the two Gliders that I soloed on , the Kirby Kite and the Kirby Cadet (Or was it Kadett ?) My total hours were 1,527:25 minutes. I will continue with the next lot soon.