Ian BB (your call, Sir !) and
Ormeside,
Ian, I am very interested in the washout rates that you give for Clewiston on your Dad's Course 12. I reckon 11% for the RAF entry, and just 6% for the US Cadets. This is so widely different from the early "Arnold" figures (40%) and some BFTS (30%) that it is difficult to tease out the truth, I'm trying to make sense of it all, and may Post if I ever succeed.
Ormeside, your "odd man out" at Terrell would have been a Warrant Officer, I'm sure. They had them in the US Forces: they wore a gold 2/Lieut's bar with a thin black (?) stripe across the middle. I'm not sure how they were addressed or whether they were saluted.
I should think their lowly status reflected the fact that they hadn't had the minimum two years (IIRC) "College" (better yet, a degree) required for appointment as a Flight "Kay-det". Clearly, this chap had (exceptionally) - I never saw one - come up from the ground ranks in the way many of our pilot trainees had done.
And your: "
we were towed by Miles Masters, so quite fast". We had one such on 20 Sqdn at Valley in '50, a Mk III with a radial engine. We had it to tow a drogue target from a hook somewhere below, but we never used it as such (our Beaufighter did all that) and it soon disappeared. I've always been under the impression that I once flew it, but my log has no entry.
Wiki tells me that it
was fast, but my recollection of the old Mk.Is on my AFS in '42 does not support this (I would reckon the Harvard faster). But then, we had Spitfire XVIs and Vampires on 20 Sqdn. and everything is relative, I suppose. That it could haul a glider (even a small one) surprises me.
I've lifted two pictues from Wiki to show the 'up' and 'down' positions for the instructor that I mentioned in a Post on this Thread long ago (contrast the head position relative to the fuselage behind in the two shots).
Yes, the Horoshima and Nagasaki bombs took us all by surprise; everything was chaotic after that.
Cheers, Danny
Mk I (down)
Miles M.27 Master III (W8667), No.5 SFTS
(up)