I can't believe that after all these years on PPRuNe, I've never looked at this thread. It's prodictively filling a very dull day off down route.
I had to have a chuckle at the reminisces of the QGH approach (roughly page 12) and how some people were still using it in the 70's. At EFTS RAF Swinderby, we were still using it as late as 1993.One of our Chipmunks while flying the procedure had a near miss with a Scampton Jet Provost which was flying the ILS onto their 05. It turned out there had been a mistake and that the procedures overlapped. Someone had assumed that we were no longer using such an outdated procedure, but it was the only way we had of getting below cloud.
In fact, this thread shows that not a lot had changed in fitty years of RAF flying training. We were still using taildraggers equipped with cartridge starters and the 1938 standard blind flying panel, and some of the taller students had to wear just the MK1 cloth inner helmet. However, the product was good and our students with just 63 hours had an excellent pass rate at the later stages of training.
The syllabus had the first solo at 10:45 and most seemed to achieve it in less.