Final part of Hawker Typhoon pilot Peter Brett's memoirs
It's been almost a year since I posted the penultimate instalment of Peter's memoirs, and the reason for the delay is that the last instalment had not actually been written down by Peter.
Instead Mrs TOW sat down with him while he talked through it, and she took handwritten notes, and later typed them up. I have made a few attempts at corrections where the original did not quite make sense. In fact I am still not sure what is meant by "...a forced powered approach and landing", so perhaps someone will be kind enough to explain.
Peter is still well and living in France with his wife Ann. He will be 89 years old next June. His town's Mayor visited him recently to tell him that he was now his commune's oldest resident! I think Peter saw that as a rather dubious honour - as if he was being lined up to be the next one to go!
Anyway, I hope you have enjoyed reading these memoirs over the last two or three years, and I hope that now this thread is back at the top again, others will be encouraged to continue in a similar vein.
TOW.
Due to the flying restrictions we were spending a lot of time away from base - either in Kristiansand or in Oslo at the weekends. When we were on base we spent most of our time sitting in German aircraft learning the cockpit layout because we still assumed that at sometime we would be officially required to fly these aircraft to Germany or somewhere else. However up until the time I left Norway nothing had happened, and everybody was getting rather frustrated. I found that what was going on was that the German aircraft were being serviced by the German aircrew and then they were given a short test flight by German pilots. I was able by making arrangements with an English speaking German pilot I knew to swap places with him and make a short flight in the two aircraft [Bf 109 and FW-190] already mentioned.
While still in Norway I had applied to remain in the RAF under a short service commission and I was waiting for results. Because of the “undercarriage incident” I had assumed this has not been granted, but I was suddenly posted onto a Flying Instructor Course. Doubtless they had read my reports and noted that I had been recommended to become an instructor by SFTS in Canada. However, before I went to the FIC I had to go to Yatesbury in Wiltshire which had been the Bristol Flying Club before the war and there I had to convert from high-speed aircraft to fly Tiger Moths!
It may seem strange to have to convert from high-speed fighters to a slow aircraft like the Tiger Moth but it was necessary because the technique of flying the Tiger Moth was so markedly different. Perhaps the best way of illustrating this is to describe two manoeuvres: a normal turn and a slow roll. In a normal turn in a high speed fighter all you did was to put on some aileron, ease back very slightly on the control column to keep the nose up and the aircraft would slide into a perfect turn. If you did the same thing in a Tiger Moth, all that happened was that the aircraft tilted in the direct you had moved the control column and in a few seconds began to slide into a banked attitude.
So in a Tiger Moth you had, at the same time as applying bank, to apply the correct amount of rudder to keep the turn and bank indicator needle on zero. This originally caused me quite a bit of difficulty but as time went on I found that I could do this quite well. The other thing about the roll that was so different was that in a high speed fighter all you did was to increase speed slightly either by a slight dive or opening the throttle and then whacking on full aileron and the aircraft would do a rapid rotation about the longitudinal axis. This rotation was fast enough keep you in the seat.
In the Tiger Moth you had to increase speed by first diving, then bringing up the nose. As you applied full aileron the aircraft would rotate. As the roll got to 90 degrees you had to apply top rudder to keep the nose up. As the roll continued to the inverted attitude, you closed the throttle because the Tiger Moth engine would not run this way up and at the same time you centralised the rudder and eased the stick forward to keep the nose up. Continuing the rotation on the downward side (through 270 degrees) you again applied top rudder to keep the nose up and brought the control column back again to the central position on the right or left-hand side. As you approached normal flying attitude you had to centralise all the controls and open the throttle again. Needless to say this required a great deal of practice and it was some time before I could do a smooth slow roll in a Tiger Moth. Of course in the Tiger Moth, the rotation speed was much slower and consequently on the inverted part of the roll you would be actually hanging on the straps because the rotation speed was insufficient to keep you in your seat
It is perhaps worth noting here that there are two other methods of rolling a Tiger Moth: the barrel roll and the flick roll. In the barrel roll you flew the aircraft in a spiral around an imaginary fore and aft line and there was a sort of a stretched out loop because you had to get up to a really high speed and fly the spiral part, all the time keeping the control column back as one would in a loop but at the same time going round this imaginary horizontal line. The rotation speed here was not very fast but because you were at all times pulling out as in a loop, you remained in the seat. Therefore it was in effect a stretched out loop.
The other method of rolling – the flick roll – was much more violent. You slowed down to about 5 or 10 miles an hour above stalling speed and then whacked on full rudder and stick fully back and the aircraft would flip into a rotation, go into auto-rotation and you then straightened out as soon as you were round the 360 degrees. In effect what you were doing was putting the aircraft into a spin in the horizontal plane and with a Tiger Moth this was quite easy. It was hard to get it into a spin in the first place but if you let go of everything it immediately recovered.
This was one of the troubles of a Tiger Moth. It was so easy to recover from a spin or a stall by letting go of everything that it was considered too safe to be an instructing machine and later on they changed to a Jet Provost as the primary aircraft.
I stayed in Yatesbury for about three or four weeks and the only thing I remember about it was that next door to the airfield was a major radar school and by Yatesbury railway station was the Harris Sausage Factory. The food was superb - they had a really good chef. The mess was staffed by civilians with a RAF warrant officer as manager and because it was civilian staff it didn’t have a waiter so we had to queue up and get the meal from a buffet. They used to open the doors to the dining room as soon as things were ready, so we queued up in the corridor outside and quite a lot of horseplay went on here. The WO, who obviously couldn’t say ‘come on you lads stop it and be sensible’, had a few words he would say in a loud voice: “Decorum, gentlemen – DECORUM! This usually sorted things out.
On the flying side, they once brought in a Handley-Page Halifax aircraft for use by the radar school in a trial. They stopped all flying while the aircraft approached the short grass airfield. The pilot made three approaches. On the first two he went around, but the third time he came in with quite high throttle settings and almost at a stall. He cut the throttles as he crossed the boundary and thumped onto the ground, rolled rapidly across the airfield and just before he hit the fence the other side, he put it into a controlled ground loop. Luckily the undercarriage withstood the sideways pressures. He managed to stop and taxi over to the parking place.
After Yatesbury I was posted to Booker at Reading which was where the Miles Aircraft Company was situated, and I undertook the Flying Instructors Course. This consisted of all the standard manoeuvres in a Tiger Moth but mainly you had to learn the official patter for each manoeuvre and to be able to coordinate the speech with what the aircraft was doing. This required varying speed at which you said things depending on the manoeuvre. I seemed to do all right on this and I remember on the final test with the Chief Flying Instructor, everything went well and then, on the approach he said I was to do a forced powered approach and landing and I remember that the patter finished up by saying ‘…that now with the aircraft in the landing position, one gently closes the throttle and the aircraft will sink onto the ground’. And as I said “ground” I felt the wheels touch. It was really quite a good feeling! I got my Instructor’s licence and it was marked in the front of my logbook. We had a couple of weeks leave and came back to our first course.
Initially we were given a course of chaps who had already got their wings who were being shunted around until they were being demobbed. We used to take them up as dual and let them fly for their allotted time. The favourite thing of one of my pupils was to fly upside down but I found this remarkably boring to sit there with the engine just rotating and gliding upside down so I used to allow him 10 minutes before telling him that I had control, flick roll it upright and start doing other more interesting things.
Then there was an odd occurrence which I can never explain. I can remember flying a Miles Magister which appears in my logbook but then I have a complete blank until I woke up in the RAFHospital in Swindon feeling absolutely terrible, and with a high temperature. I was told that they thought I had glandular fever plus carbon monoxide poisoning from the ride in the ambulance! In the medical tests that followed, they found that I was actually suffering from tuberculosis. I was immediately invalided out and my RAF career was ended.
The treatment for TB was to collapse the lung partially by air pressure and I couldn’t fly even as a passenger for some time. The next time I flew as a passenger was in 1956 when I went to Jersey with my wife for a holiday. Later, I flew several times as a passenger within Europe when working for Teddington Controls.
I never handled an aircraft controls again until after I retired and moved to France. A French neighbour, Guy, who was flying from the local club took me up several times in a DR400 Robin. On the second trip he indicated that he wanted me to take over. I hadn’t handled aircraft controls for nearly 45 years and yet I did so naturally with no problems. I didn’t do a landing because I found that my eyesight was not good enough to flip between outside and the instruments and I could no longer read the instruments clearly anyway. However, I enjoyed it immensely and it showed that once you have learned to fly, you don’t ever completely forget!