...And Talk of Many Schemes.....
Ormeside28,
(Your #5644),
"....Pay for we cadets (LAC's) was 7/3, seven shillings and sixpence (sic), per day...."
It sounds remarkably generous! When I went out at the beginning of 9/41, I'm positive I only got 5/6 as a LAC. Although you were much later behind me, I can't recall much of a rise of pay rates during (or indeed after the war). Was there perhaps some sort of Overseas Allowance for the US introduced later ? Your $ exchange rate ($4.06/£) is only a hairsbreadth away from the fixed official rate ($4.08/£) at the time. The RAF missed a trick there (at a time when dollars were very scarce) !
Reading your account of your exploration of the Southern states (and those of many other former BFTS cadets on this Thread, and in Will Largent's book), it seems as if you had a social life far superior to our spartan "Arnold" existence. Our situation at Carlstrom Field was as I described it in my early Posts of the place: "We were effectively confined to camp the whole time, as there was nowhere to go and no transport to get us there anyway". (One of Largent's many contributors says that the Greyhound buses had a service W.Palm Beach-Arcadia-Sarasota, with a stop at Carlstrom, but it was certainly not running when we were there). And we did not have all that much spare time. I flew on 19 consecutive days after I arrived, so "weekends" had gone out of the window.
A few minutes 'tot' in my Log shows that I flew 207 hours in 180 days there. Of these I flew on 136 days; 21 days were spent in travel and settling-in on first arrival and after the two changes of School during the Course; there were 11 days when we were "grounded" for hurricanes and other bad weather. That leaves 12 days unaccounted for, or 2 days a month. They worked us hard !
As I've reported, at Carlstrom our Instructor took us out to his home in Sarasota one day, and a bunch of six of us hired a car and went across to West Palm Beach on a '48' one weekend, but that was all I can remember in the way of free time.
Another drawback of the Arnold system was that, although I kept my one (civilian) Instructor for the whole of Primary (plus two "check" riders at 20hr and 40hr), at Basic I had four different Lieutenants, and at Advanced six of them (plus one RAF [a P/O MacMillan - he must have been one of the very first of the 556 "creamed off" from the Arnold Scheme]. So why didn't he go to a BFTS, which would be the natural place for him ?.... Don't know)....D.
In response to a PM enquiry, my authority for the early UK "120 hr-to-Wings" is the Graves "Thin Blue Line", and I believe that was what was adopted in the beginning of the BFTS and "Empire" schemes. As I've mentioned before, there seems to have been an early decision to extend the BFTS to 200 hrs (like the "Arnold"); in the later Courses they put that into effect, but exactly when I don't know. At the same time, the RCAF ("Empire" scheme - my #5594) were holding on to 140 hrs !
Ian BB,
Your Dad's 100 hours in UK between the States and India would (at a guess) have been 25 hrs AFU and 75 hrs OTU, or very near it....D.
This has got a bit long. Cheers, Danny.
Last edited by Danny42C; 19th May 2014 at 22:29.
Reason: Spacing and Extra Text.