MPN11 (revisiting your #8713),
... despite having a PPL, I admit I did not do terribly well during Flying Grading...
This statement, though factually correct, needs to be heavily qualified. You may remember, some years ago, it was the subject of a Post of mine in which I declared that, IMHO, the Navy had treated you very shabbily indeed.
I have been seeking to trace that Post, to tell the true story again, and remove any false impression created by your modest statement above. "
Search This Thread" - broken reed as usual. Good old Google got a lead on it - but only to refer me to a page on the "Archive". So I know it's in there somewhere, but as the Archive Page is about the size of the Bible, it's "a needle in a haystack" job. Nevertheless rolled up sleeves and started.
To save me more drudgery, can you (or anybody else) refer me to that Page/Post No. (on this Thread?) Better yet, if it
is found, you Edit your #8713 with a cut/paste of my remarks.
Now, you know how it is, when you're vainly looking for something, you often find something else instead you were looking for before. So it is here. A timely reminder that, although old dogs
can learn new tricks, some old dogs are better at it than others (there's a lot of this, so settle back)
My Post to MPN11 19.6.14:
_____________________
"As the Courses came in, we laid on a Welcome Party early the second
evening, so that the Instructors and their new students could get acquainted before formal lessons began. These were held in the Instructors' Common Room on the first floor of the Main building, and modest alcoholic and non-alcoholic refreshments were laid on.
I particularly remember one such occasion - it must have been in the early years (no exact date) before the influx of new, young entrants had started. Instructors and nearly all the students were still both of the "old" ex-war generation: there were frequent cries of joyful recognition as another pair of old comrades were happily reunited, perhaps for the first time in twenty years.
I'm not sure, but I think that each Instructor was allotted two or three students, to monitor them at least for the first week or two until they'd settled in. In this instance, I got two (names long forgotten) Master Aircrew, a Czech pilot and a British signaller (former Wop/AG), and they could not have been more unlike in appearance. Naturally we were all out of uniform: ranks being of no consequence here.
The Czech's history was a familiar one. In the pre-war Czecho-Slovakian Air Force, he'd got out ahead of the German invasion and across to France. Hardly had he settled there when France collapsed and he'd managed to get away a second time (by devious means) across the Channel to the UK. There the RAF was glad of every pilot they could get their hands on; he flew with the Czech Squadrons, and RAF Transport Command, throughout the war years.
Post-war, he stayed here (like many of his compatriots and the Poles, well knowing the likely reception they'd get from the new Communist Governments), naturalised, married and stayed in the RAF till retirement. A remarkable thing was that he'd managed to continue in one flying appointment after another, never doing a ground tour (I suppose there wasn't much they could do with him); his last job being with the Hastings Met flights out of Aldergrove before he came to us.
I gathered that he'd not exactly "volunteered" for ATC: he struck me as a little, wizened, prematurely "old" man, seemed taciturn and uncommunicative in the extreme, and by no means happy with his posting to Shawbury. "We're going to have trouble here", I mused.
The other (Master Signaller) was the complete reverse. Sleek, assured and confident in a well-cut blue pinstripe, he was the very image of a successful businessman. He was happy with his transfer to the Branch (I don't know what he'd been doing before), and was keen to get started and "make a go of it". In other words, an ideal candidate. "This one'll be no problem", was my immediate assessment.
To cut a long story short, what we got was the exact opposite of our expectations. The seemingly "bolshie" Czech turned out, in fact, to be "as bright as a button". You only had to tell him a thing once, and he'd got it. Quick thinking and resourceful, he romped through the "Mock" exercises in the face of all we could throw at him. (Of course his long and varied flying experience in war and peace could not but help enormously in this respect; we began to see why the RAF had kept him on the flight deck for so long - he was simply too valuable a man there to lose). Needless to say, he completed the Course successfully, breezed through the Final Exam and was on his way (where to, I know not, but some SATCO must have thanked his lucky stars).
It was the other way round with my Master Sig. It wasn't that he was lazy or uncooperative: he was clearly trying his hardest, building up a huge swathe of notes and spending hours swotting them up. His trouble was that (there is no other way of putting it): he was "thick as two planks". He was a Slow Learner, but we helped all we could, and I'm happy to recall that he scraped through at the end by sheer determination. I hope they shoehorned him into some quiet, low intensity place where he might do very well".
I learned my lesson from that - never judge by appearances !
Danny.