Page 54 - Demo

50to switch each one off in turn. The idea was that the RPM should only drop a little bit if one failed in flight. It must be remembered that these engines were very old and not overly reliable. In fact, we were limited to below 2000ft in normal operations to keep the wear on the engines down to a minimum. This meant that when you transited to the Atlantic from Kinloss you had to fly round between Scotland and the Orkneys.The first part of the flying course was just getting to grips with the aircraft. We were split into 2 crews and I was teamed up with Hugh Mackenzie. We slowly learnt to handle the aircraft including flying circuits and then instrument flying and passing our instrument ratings. Pilots were trained up to first pilot standard in Coastal Command. On a 12 hour sortie anything could happen and so it was important that even as a co-pilot you could handle everything yourself. Thus, you could become a first pilot or captain at the Squadron Commanders discretion whenever he felt you were competent enough without having any further training. Most other multi-engine squadrons co-pilots had to go and do another course before being made a captain. To prove you were good enough you had to fly as captain by day and night during the course. The instructor would get out leaving the 2 student pilots in the seats together with a staff flight engineer and a couple of signallers or AEOps as they were then. (They were generally referred to as siggies) You would then be sent off to do a few circuits before landing, changing seats and going again. I can remember when we first did this at night. The dual sortie had been fine, and Hugh had had his go. My first circuit was fine but on the second or third we ran into cloud downwind. This was a bit of a shock and not forecast. I just went around at 1000ft and came out of the cloud again. We decided we would try the next circuit at 800ft or so and even then, we were in and out of the cloud. I turned finals and saw the runway although the weather was closing fast. I really hoped for a good landing and luckily did it and so we were safely down. The staff monitoring us in the control tower said the next plan