Page 43 - Demo

39To get the most out of each flying hour the students were paired up with an instructor. He taught the first student while the second sat in a chair between them. You were not strapped into this chair but then again it was not fixed to anything anyway. Just an office chair resting on the floor. Basically, you just hung on to the seats in front. We also wore parachute harnesses, and the aircraft had parachutes stowed on board. It was very second world war as you wandered out to the aircraft with your harness on. In fact, later in the course when we had to do low flying, we had to fly a particular route out to the wash, coasting in somewhere and then flying back around the countryside. We were all gathered into the briefing room to be told all about the route. There was a map with a ribbon pinned to it showing where to go. The briefing room was as it would have been during the war as this was a wartime aerodrome anyway. It took place at the end of the day and we had had to wait for a bit before the last crew came in and they came in still with their harnesses on. At the end of the briefing the instructor asked if there were any questions and one chap said, %u201cHow much flack is expected as we coast in.%u201d The room erupted but that was exactly what it felt like. To practise what we had been taught we flew mutual sorties with 2 students flying together. One student was authorised as captain and the other as co-pilot. The way we saw it was that the co-pilots duties included tuning in the radio compass to radio 1 and detuning it when we landed and if you smoked, to hold the cigarettes below the coaming so that the runway controller could not see them when you landed and of course, when you had finished your cigarette to throw the stub out of the window. As I said a lot of the course was to teach you to handle the aircraft on one engine. And so, instructors would sometimes brief the co-pilot to fail an engine at some point, at a safe height of course. You usually did this when the captain was practising his stalling sequence. You had to be able to demonstrate a stall and recovery and there was a