The prettiest village in England.
That's what was said about the village of Castle Combe, and it may well have been true. Our interest was in the hilltop above, where a large field had been turned into a Relief Landing Ground for Hullavington, a few miles away.
(Today it serves as a motor racing circuit, but the runways there now had not been built in our time).
Here the Air force had planted the usual gaggle of Laing and Nissen huts, with a collection of Miles Master Mk Is and a few elderly Hurricanes, left over from the great days of 1940. The Master was a curious aircraft, the story I was told was this:
At the end of the biplane era, the RAF had in store large numbers of Rolls-Royce "Kestrel" engines, new and low-hours, taken from the scrapped Hawker biplanes used throughout the thirties. Miles was a small builder of wooden aircraft; they'd already sold a primary trainer, the "Magister" to the RAF, but I don't think it was much competition for the established De Havilland "Tiger Moth" (DH82). The Air Ministry then had the idea of building a wooden advanced trainer, to use up these "Kestrels". Miles got the contract.
With hindsight, we can see that they had simply re-invented the wheel. The definitive single-engined advanced trainer already existed: the North American AT-6A, which we know as the "Harvard". This was mass-produced in the States and Canada, and was available to us after "Lend-Lease" in 1941. Maybe the "Master" was ordered earlier, when we'd need scarce dollars for the Harvard, whereas Miles would be happy with sterling. And of course, we wouldn't have to buy any engines. Waste not, want not.
We didn't realise that the Harvard is one of those rare aircraft which simply couldn't be bettered for the work it had to do. The C47 "Dakota" was another, and in today's civil aviation I suppose the Boeing 737 fills the bill. In the end, almost all single-engine pilots trained in the Empire Air Training Scheme or in the USA flew the Harvard. The Australians converted some into single-seat fighters (the "Wirraway") in the desperate days after the fall of Singapore. They were a good deal better than nothing, and at least as good as the Brewster "Buffalo", which had been the main air support in Malaya.
Before leaving the story of the Master, there were two sequels. It's well said that the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. A decade later, the same mistake was made again. Again the RAF had a batch of good engines on the shelf (Merlins), and aircraft builders looking for contracts.
This resulted in not one advanced trainer, but two. Avro produced the "Athena", and Boulton Paul the "Balliol" to the same specification. They were as alike as two peas, and the ostensible reason for their introduction was the new policy of side-by-side seating for student and instructor. I could never see the point in that idea, but the Air force was decided on it, and it led to the "Provost" family of piston and jet trainers. (I suppose it could make it possible for the instructor to thump his student - or vice versa. Our instructors' only recourse was to slam the stick violently from side to side to deliver a painful blow inside our knees).
But surely we didn't need all that many new pilots in our scaled down post-war RAF? There would be plenty of demobilised wartime pilots about, still in their mid-twenties, and only too keen to get back into the "band of brothers" of happy memory.
The Athena and Balliol soon faded from the post-war scene. I did a refresher course on the Balliol in 1953, and remember a real "old gentleman's aircraft", comfortable, easy to fly and no more than a bigger and more powerful copy of the Master.
The second sequel? Post-war, Miles diversified into making the very first ball-point pen in 1945. A few got out to India via welfare sources. I forget its trade name. (EDIT: It was the Miles Martin Pen). I bought one, it cost two guineas (say £50 today). The business end was much the same as now, but the ink was contained in a long, fine, copper capillary tube, folded several times. This made the barrel rather fat. No matter, we were used to fat fountain pens and marvelled at this new invention.
Back at Castle Combe, bussed out from Hullavington on our first morning, we had a good look at the Master. First impressions were favourable. It stood four-square on a wide undercarriage. Narrow meant trouble. A wide "track"
makes an aircraft much easier to handle on the ground and lessens the chance of a "ground loop". This shaming faux-pas happens to a pilot when a "swing" develops, usually on a cross-wind landing or on take-off when power has been fed in too quickly before reaching "steerage way" (don't throw the horse into the collar before the cart's moving). If you don't catch a swing at once, it may go out of control and you describe a graceful pirouette (usually in sight of a mocking audience), Damage is rare - unless you hit something or are swinging fast enough to put a wingtip in. In those days it happened to nearly everyone at one time or another. Now nosewheel undercarriages are almost universal, and they can't ground-loop. For this reason, many of today's pilots are wary of flying an old "tail-dragger".
Climbing in, we were introduced to the standard British cockpit and panel layouts we were going to fly with from now on. The Master was dual, we had the instructor in the back. His forward visibility was poor, and the designers had (unusually) taken pity on him. The roof of his "glasshouse" hinged up to form an extended windscreen, and his seat rose so that he could see over the cockpit in front. There must have been some way to extend or raise his stick (and rudder pedals), otherwise he would have a better view of coming disaster, but no way of doing anything about it. My recollection is that instructors didn't use this facility much.
That's about your lot for tonight, Goodnight all !
Danny
Gentlemen, today is the tenth - again!
Last edited by Danny42C; 24th Mar 2012 at 02:49.