Private flying immediately before and in the years following WWII
 

Hi Guys,

I wonder if someone can confirm or correct my understanding of what happened to private flying between 1939 and about 1960.

To the best of my knowledge, when war became inevitable in 1939 private flying in the UK was banned and all privately owned and club aircraft became commandeered by the RAF.

During the war years there was thus no private flying. When the war ended, few of the commandeered aircraft were returned to their original owners, many of them having been used as training or liaison aircraft which were either written off by military student pilots or else destroyed by enemy action. I don't know whether any compensation was paid to the original owners of these aircraft, but rather think not.

In the years after the war, private and club flying gradually resumed mostly using government surplus Tiger Moths and Miles Magisters which could then be purchased from the government packed in crates almost for buttons.

In 1946 the Auster Company gradually went back into production producing the J1 Autocrat and later the J1N Autocrat which then began to find their way into the flying clubs.

These three types formed the backbone of private and club flying until the early sixties when the perishing of the casein glues used in their construction forced them to be either scrapped or completely rebuilt. Most clubs, however, scrapped these aircraft and re-equipped with Piper Pa22 Colts or Cessna 150s.

Can anybody please add to this or improve its accuracy?

Regards,

BP.

you really need to specify which country you are talking about.

There is an article titled 'Flying for a Song', written by Lewis Benjamin, which describes the formation of the Brookside Flying Group at Shoreham in the immediate postwar period. The group operated a couple of Miles Magisters (the second bought after the fatal crash of the first).

The article can be read online here, from page 25: Aeroplane 2007 12

Putting ex-RAF Tiger Moths onto the civil register was not as easy as one might think. They could be bought for £5 a piece, but the Ministry of Civil Aviation did not make life easy if you wanted to put them back in the air.

If you read Flight (now Flight International) from the period via the Flight Global archive, you can gain a good insight into what was flying, and the types of events. It was far more of a flying club diary than it is now, and it is apparent that a surprising variety of pre-war types were still being operated. Aviation History - Browse the History of Flight from 1909

point taken.
honestly I can think of two countries with an RA(A)F, tiger moths and building austers. :}

Kingsford Smith Aviation bought Austers into Australia enginless and worked them up into saleable aeroplanes locally.

Austers were blown into the weeds by Cessna. The 172 when it was introduced would have looked like a spaceship in comparison.

It should not be forgotten that Britain was desparately short of money for importing all the shiny new American aeroplanes, or the materials from which to build something similar. Very high rates of tax were applied to imported goods Fuel was rationed too, so unless you were very rich, low powered aircraft or gliders were the solution for the average person who wanted to fly.

The topic of compensation for loss or damage to requisitioned ('impressed') private aircraft is interesting. Glue failure relevant to Miles, Percival some D.H. types , not so much to Austers?

I'm restoring two austers.

the only glue joints in austers are in the rear structural floors, some of the components that fair around the bungees and a few doubler plates on the wing spars. the window frames are glued but all the rest screws in place.

W8 - can we know which ones - I am interested in J1/Ns at Sywell in early 60s

London Gliding club operated at Dunstable during Easter 1940 and several club machines flew with their civilian owners up to a 2,000 ft limit as a trial for training RAF personnel.

fighter command | gliding club | london gliding | 1940 | 0988 | Flight Archive

At that time the gliders had not been impressed into service. That did not happen until after the glider assaults of May 1940 became known.

Regards
Ross

a J1b and a J1n

the J1b was exported to australia directly, never flew in the UK.

the J1n was G-AGVF, now on the australian register.


btw I think broomstick got most of it fairly correct. I'm not sure if the glues problem led to mandatory destruction or not.
I read somewhere that the only wooden aeroplanes that escaped destruction were ones hidden from the authorities.
I seem to recall that the beetlenut glue was found to have the strength and consistency of dried raspberry jam. nowadays of course we would save a historic airframe by pulling it all apart, sanding back to bare wood and putting it back together with epoxy.

Get your hands on a copy of "Tails of the Forties" by John Havers and Peter Campbell. That will answer a lot of your questions.

Then the CAA will not let you fly it as it has not been rebuilt from original materials.
A Mosquito, for example.

Nada.
 

Quote:
'pulling it all apart, sanding back to bare wood and putting it back together with epoxy.
Then the CAA will not let you fly it as it has not been rebuilt from original materials.
A Mosquito, for example.'

You can't compare a Mosquito to the likes a a Maggie or a Proctor for example. To pull a Mosquito apart you'd effectively have to totally destroy it. This was the issue that BAe had with RR299. A new wooden airframe with original metalwork etc gets around this, as in the case of the recent and current Kiwi rebuilds.
There are a number of the simpler machines such as Proctors which have been (And are being...) taken-apart and re-glued - and are happily and legally flying in the UK.

have your CAA any engineering expertise at all?
have they become mindless clerical idiots?

no wonder you no longer lead the world in aeronautical engineering.

BP: your summary is close enough. Treasury controlled UK citizens' access to $ until 1959, which is why so few UScraft were UK registered, and some of them via EI-, paid in £. Auster tried to match Piper/Cessna with A.6 Atlantic, but abandoned unflown. Peter Masefield moved from Bristol in 1960 to found BEAGLE, but 206/Basset, Pup/Bulldog were over-engineered so heavy, so uneconomical and the firm failed in 1968. Govt. did help, with Launch Aid (206) and RAF orders (Basset/Bulldog). Big firms chose to ignore genav: Shorts took licences for various Beechcraft, abortively. France, au contraire, sponsored air-mindedness, with subsidies for PPL courses and for club purchase of indigenous types. Cessna therefore made a licence arrangement with Reims Avn. who built/assembled many over 4 decades.

Hope this works, three scans from Terence Boughton's book - The Story of the British Light Aeroplane...

http://i43.tinypic.com/1z30x9v.jpg
http://i42.tinypic.com/2wgukvn.jpg
http://i44.tinypic.com/oa5f1t.jpg

My old Dad ex RAF was friends with several ex RAF types, all small wiry sorts with handlbar moustaches here in the Lancashire area about 1956/7, I remember one of them( ex RAF pilot Neville Smith) owned an Auster, it was kept at Squires Gate, I was taken regularly to that far away place to help push the massif doors open then shown where to push and then help to push the Auster out of the hanger then shut that huge door again, finally I was squeezed into the tiny area behind the two front seats, I must admit my very first flight frightened me stiiff, It was cold and draughty and so noisy that I could not hear my dad shouting such things as are you OK or thats Preston, I seemed to spend an awful lot of time looking at the same landscape, it must have been quite a slow A/c , it was almost a blessing to get out at the end, but those flights fired my aviation dreams. , side slips also caused me some anguish I thought we would fall out of the side of such a flimsy A/C :eek:,

Still I am a child of the Steam Age, so I can look back on such things and smile at the simplicity of my early connections with flying.:D

Peter R-B
Lancashire

Just bought some ancient Air Enthusiasts...#11 has 2 pages on Mosquito structural problems esp. in the tropics
http://i809.photobucket.com/albums/z...ps614d642c.jpg
http://i809.photobucket.com/albums/z...ps1d718771.jpg

Any ideas on impressment compensation?

Panshanger in the middle fifties had Tiger Moths, Austers and at least one of each, Messenger and Gemini. I don't recall anything else until a Tri-Pacer appeared later on. As dubbleyew eight suggested, by comparison it looked like the Starship Enterprise.