Danny gets to Primary School at Carlstrom Field.
We put our chalk-striped suits away, and wore plain overalls all day. Effectively we were confined to camp all the time, there being nowhere to go and no means of transport to get us there. We did have one weekend off in our two months there; six of us managed to hire an old Plymouth (bottom level Chrysler) and took off for West Palm Beach. I don't think anyone even asked about driving licences. What stays in my memory is a petrol stop somewhere in the sticks. It was only a hand-cranked pump outside a shack, and "gas" was 8c (four old pence) a gallon!
We had neither the inclination or the money for the high life, we booked in some scruffy motel at the back of town and spent our time swimming, sightseeing and stuffing ourselves with hot dogs and ice cream. Then the long lonely haul back across Florida. I think that was the only time I was off the camp, except from one weekend when our flying instructor took us out to his home in Sarasota for the day - and looked after us royally! We gazed in hopeless envy at his brand-new Mercury (upmarket Ford) convertible. You got a lot of car for your money out there in those days.
Minor infractions of the rules earned "demerits", and when a sufficient total had been reached, you had to expunge them by "walking the ramp". This punishment drill involved having to march up and down a beat - the "ramp" -outside the Admin. Office (where they could keep an eye on you) for the allotted period. You had to keep up this palace guard routine for this time. Half an hour under the Florida sun was enough to convince most people of the error of their ways. Needless to say, a Goody-two-shoes like me took care to keep his nose clean.
The only formal duty imposed on us was to attend the daily flag-raising ceremony. This was at dawn, it was still quite dark. The flagpole and surrounding recently planted palm trees were braced with guy wires. These caused some hilarity; the Officer of the Day sometimes garotting himself or tripping over these invisible hazards. Then it was back for breakfast (plenty of maple syrup and waffles as well as your ham-and-eggs). And then ground school or Flight Line.
They issued each of us with a little, amusing booklet of helpful tips and advice
for our flying training (oh, why didn't I hang on to mine - and also to the wonderfully funny "Tee Emms" - RAF training magazines - we had during the War?) * Many an octo/nonagenarian would love to read once more of the misdeeds of Pilot Officer Prune, navigator Flying Officer Fix, signaller Sgt Backtune, disreputable dog "Binder", Air Commodore Byplane-Ffixpitch and all the rest of that glorious crew - surely stationed at Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh or somewhere very like it.
From memory, two bits of doggerel I remember from the Carlstrom booklet:
Neither wind direction, sock nor Tee,
Cut any ice with Philbert Magee.
At last a crash made him change his mind -
You can't use a field you've left behind!
and
Otis McKay, still twenty feet high,
Sat stalling it in without batting an eye
Or using his throttle to help him on down.
The Flight Surgeon says he'll recover, the clown!
(Can't remember any more, except this bit of homespun advice to get you to relax in the air - "wiggle your piggies!")
Note *
Commercially produced photograpic facsimilies of the complete series are available on CDrom - I've got one since my words above - try Google.
And then we met our instructors, four students to each. I drew Bob Greer, a softly-spoken, unflappable young man from South Carolina. He cannot have been more than five years older than we were. A pilot always remembers his first flying instructor, the one who sent him "solo", in memory he will be the best pilot there ever was. Learning to fly is hard, and Bob was kind and patient.
We buckled on our chutes and waddled over to our Stearman. Boeing had taken over Stearman years before, but the name stuck. A very strong two-seat biplane (open cockpits) was hauled along by a 220hp Continental radial engine. It was bigger, heavier and more powerful than its contemporary, our Tiger Moth. Like the Tiger, the thing flies to this day and looks as if it might go on for ever. Many Stearmans went into civil life after the war, converted into crop sprayers, where agility and toughness are "musts". And they seem to be the aircraft of choice for "wing-walkers" - a waste of time if ever I saw one.
Bob took the front cockpit with me in the back. There was no intercom, a system of hand signals was used and obviously the pupil had to see them. Bob could also throttle back and shout at me. It worked quite well. His cockpit had a useful fitting which mine lacked - an airspeed indicator (ASI).
Now any pilot of a later generation is sitting bolt upright in frank disbelief. Pull the other one - it's got bells on! How on earth can you fly without an ASI? Well, you can and we did. Or, to be precise, I did - for my first sixty hours. What you've never had, you never miss. The trick lay in flying "Attitude".
The cylinder heads of the engine could be seen around the nose. On take off, you got the tail up, waited until the aircraft felt "light", and lifted it until the horizon came level with the top pair of rockerboxes. The Stearman would float off. Holding it in that position for half a minute (take-off climb), you raised it until the next pair of "pots" lined up on the horizon (normal climb). From there, we flew round the sky happy as sandboys. If the wires started to scream, you were going too fast (if a wing came off, much too fast - only joking!) If the wires fell quiet, and the stick felt a bit sloppy, you were too slow (if you fell out of the sky, much too slow). Back at the field, you throttled back, put the top of the nose on the horizon, and it would glide nicely.
It was classic "flying by the seat of your pants", and in this simple aircraft, it worked like a charm. I am sorry to admit that it was possible, when solo to cheat. If you raised your seat to the maximum, then stretched up over the windscreen, you could just see the ASI in the front seat. But you'd only do this in aerobatics, for example to see if you had enough speed for a loop.
On arrival, we were issued with a name card holder for our overalls, and a set of coloured printed name cards . Blue for a "lower class" man, red for an "upper" (or was it the other way round?) As in most flying schools, this referred to the two parts of the Course, senior or junior. Ominously, there was also a white name card in your set. This was a badge of shame for the dreaded "washout".
Danny42C
You had a good home, and you left, left, left, left.............(Get those arms up!)
Last edited by Danny42C; 22nd Feb 2012 at 20:33.