Danny at 5409 and
Chugalug at 5410 ... your posts there inspired me to go and have a look at the old ATC Course photos in our secret “ATC Old & Bold" photo album, and kick some memory cells into life.
Up to around 1962, all the students in those photos seemed to have a flying badge of one sort on another, together with at least one row of ribbons from the 'recent bit of trouble'. The first 'lurking plt off' I spotted was in around '61 (subsequently gp capt, see below). And it remained that way for the next couple of years ... the very occasional plt off or a/plt off surrounded by wartime aircrew. Even in 65, when I went through CATCS, the course was roughly 1/3 each of wartime aircrew, post-war aircrew and a/plt offs. I assume this 'demographic bulge' applied in other Branches as well.
What it meant for us newbies was, of course, that all the senior posts in the Branch had already been filled. And our careers (beyond automatic promotion to flt lt) would remain on hold until “age wearied them” and the cork finally popped out of the bottle to make room for our generation. I remember talking to one of our handful of gp capts in the bar at Uxbridge in about 1974. He was waxing nostalgic at the time, and told me that he had been lying in his bath, as a recently promoted wg cdr, when he realised that in a couple of years time he would almost certainly be a gp capt … all the current incumbents were due to retire, as were most of the extant wg cdrs! And so it was to be!
As Danny noted in his post, the ‘clear out’ (or the bursting to that age bubble, as I prefer to think of it) created a whole new world for us kids! My generation were now making sqn ldr after 4-5 years as flt lts (to my personal delight) and the best of the early promotees soared though the ranks largely unhindered (to create another bulge!!). In such a small Branch, it was of course quite easy to keep track of things - my marked-up copy of the Air Force List acquired some notoriety
But with roughly 150-170 sqn ldrs, 35-40 wg cdrs and 5 gp capts it was fairly easy to see who would (and wouldn’t) move up the ladder!
Were we a better generation? No, just different. My contemporaries and I at least had the benefit of working with/under the wartime generation - different attitudes in some areas, but invariably professional and with high standards that they instilled into we youngsters. They had been through the war, in the air, and knew what it was all about. My first mentor on OJT was a MPlt … a former a/sqn ldr on Typhoons who at War’s end was deemed unsuitable for holding a peacetime commission and to stay in the RAF was required to revert to Sgt Pilot! You can imagine he was not immensely tolerant of errors by baby plt offs straight out of the box! There were many others like Black Jack - they taught us our trade from a multi-faceted view on life, peace and war, air and ground. Not just ATCOs, of course - the people we controlled were frequently wartime too, and they helped our development with some ‘interesting’ conversations in the bar over a beer or two.
I’ve always believed they made us better.
