Ormeside28:-
First we had eight hours just sitting in the cockpit memorising all the bits and pieces.
A process that is never much talked of yet common to the Sopwith Camel and the Boeing 777, ie cockpit familiarisation. How everything shrinks in size from the wall diagrams, blackboards, whiteboards, posters, etc, of the classroom to the real thing that is now an insignificant panel, gauge, or lever crammed into the equally small cockpit space. Perhaps the groundschool phase has became more of a feature in line with such complication.
I imagine that at the time the AT6, or Harvard as we knew it, was well up there in the complication stakes, as reflected in its RAF Pilot Notes:-
A.P. 1691 D. Pilot's Notes for Harvard 2B - 2nd edition
harrym, I shall try to pick the brains of fellow volunteers at the Bluebell Railway re loco 3612. Perhaps North American readers might have an idea? All contributions gratefully received, it is the collective knowledge and experience that is the very core of this thread.
Your description of the challenge to aviation of the Canadian plains winter is vivid and instructive. Having to keep engines at high revs simply to keep them going at all created obvious problems in icy ground conditions. Having to keep airframes in a warm hangar before start up is still SOP and I have had my Hercules so cossetted at Thule before start-up and TO. Even then the starboard main gear refused to retract on selection and had to be hand cranked up.
Personal safety is of course the main preoccupation in such conditions and the buddy system requires that you only go outside at least in pairs (which wouldn't have changed the plight of your two unfortunates) and to phone ahead to the building you are heading for so that they know to expect you and to raise the alarm if you do not appear (which might have saved them).
Finally, the freedom to wander over that great country with only a requirement to report at a given place and time is a tribute to yourselves and to your superiors. Your reliability and sense of duty was of course a given, having obtained your rank and your wings, but the default state of the military mind is to never leave anything to chance. Given the mode of transportation was generally hitch-hiking, the distances covered large, and the chance of mishap in isolated circumstances considerable, it seems to me that a considerable amount was left to chance. Perhaps this was seen as both reward and rite of passage, that the boys were now made men and about to face much greater perils than merely exploring another country by thumbing it. Did anyone ever fail to materialise at Moncton or wherever, I wonder?
Danny, how good to see you in such good company with your contemporaries. We juniors may think that we now have the business of obtaining an RAF WW2 Pilots Brevet sorted but only you chaps really do, and in comparing notes perhaps even you can learn a little more of the process. Rather like learning about a military campaign long after one was involved in it, the dots and crosses can at last be added to answer the known unknowns. Thank you all, gentlemen!