My old Dad ex RAF was friends with several ex RAF types, all small wiry sorts with handlbar moustaches here in the Lancashire area about 1956/7, I remember one of them( ex RAF pilot Neville Smith) owned an Auster, it was kept at Squires Gate, I was taken regularly to that far away place to help push the massif doors open then shown where to push and then help to push the Auster out of the hangar then shut that huge door again, finally I was squeezed into the tiny area behind the two front seats, I must admit my very first flight frightened me stiiff, It was cold and draughty and so noisy that I could not hear my dad shouting such things as are you OK or thats Preston, I seemed to spend an awful lot of time looking at the same landscape, it must have been quite a slow A/c , it was almost a blessing to get out at the end, but those flights fired my aviation dreams. , side slips also caused me some anguish I thought we would fall out of the side of such a flimsy A/C
,
Still I am a child of the Steam Age, so I can look back on such things and smile at the simplicity of my early connections with flying.
Peter R-B
Lancashire