Welcome aboard,
Hummingfrog Senior, and Well Met, Sir !
Your excellent First Post on this (the best of all Threads on Prune, IMHO) has raised so many questions, and started so many hares running that I hardly know which one to begin with.(I'm sure the assembled company will bear with me as the Shawbury Senior Common Room goes in the "Pending" tray for a while).
You may be able to help me with mysteries for which I never hoped to hear an explanation. You perhaps remember that Cliff Nemo (RIP), our founder, was quite adamant that at
his BFTS (Darr Field, Oklahoma) the student body was composed 20° of Air Corps "Kay-Dets" (and he had an American "oppo" there to prove it). The idea of, course, was to see how the product of the British flying training syllabus (two-part, 140 hours - am I right ?) stood up against Kay-Dets from their own US Army Flight Schools (some of which had been taken over for RAF students under the "Arnold Scheme" - but never,
AFAIK, "mixed"). SO WHAT WAS THE FINDING ?
Nobody seems to know. And it is inportant, because if experience showed that there was no discernable difference (and exactly that was what
our OTUs found), then the American system (3-part, 200 hours) must be grossly wasteful and inefficient. And this was quite apart from the anomaly whereby the "Arnold Scheme" washed-out 40% of their RAF intake, whereas the comparable BFTS figure was almost nil - and both from a broadly similar "feedstock" ! (I never found what the Air Corps washout rate was with their
own people).
Did you have US Army Air Corps students with you at Terrell Field, Texas ? What did they think about the RAF syllabus ? When they graduated, did they receive their silver wings and a 2/Lieut's Commission in the same way as if they'd gone through the US system ?
That's enough to going on with. Looking forward to your next....D.
dogle,
It would seem that we came into Liverpool from Bombay in the middle of a whole host of small-pox carriers (having offloaded our one case in Gibraltar). These would almost all have been servicemen who had been vaccinated in infancy (as everyone had been in our day), re-vaccinated on entry into the Services, and certainly re-vaccinated at least once more when going out East, and then a final time before embarking for UK.
So
how on Earth ? Something funny was going on.....D.
Cheers, both. Danny.