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disorienting , which is of course the point. But after a couple of goes, we became confident and even cocky. With six of us plonked in the rear cabin, a sign language game of ‘After you’, ‘No really, after you’, ‘No please, I insist’ then ensued, to the growing irritation of the excellent Navy divers who were there to watch that we didn’t get into trouble. The module only stayed under for less than a minute. The really cool customers were the divers who watched us vacate the module safely before strapping themselves in to ride it back upright and out of the water. We also practised the same escape in darkness with the tower windows blacked out. The dunker saved lives: those aircrew who survived crashes or ditchings at sea which killed their passengers, undoubtedly did so because of their sessions in the dunker.
    Learning to fly helicopters is an expensive business. The Navy wants to make sure its pilots can learn as quickly and efficiently as possible. It’s far cheaper to get used to the unfamiliar environment of being airborne in a fixed-wing aircraft than a rotary one. So the first seventy-five hours of our flying training involved a few months based at RAF Topcliffe in Yorkshire learning to fly the Bulldog, a small single-engine propeller-driven aeroplane that was a vast improvement on the Chipmunk. After just eight hours flying, the instructor stepped out and left me to fly my first solo. Aerobatics, navigation training, night-flying and formation flying were all progressively introduced to us. The Bulldog was easy to fly and our time passed all too quickly.
    We moved down to Cornwall and our first real taste of proper Navy life at RNAS Culdrose for Basic Flying Training on the Gazelle helicopter. All helicopters are inherently unstable. Left to their own devices, they would much prefer to roll over and crash than remain in stable controlled flight. Having arrived with a confident belief that our ability to fly Bulldogs made us masters of the universe, we were put firmly in our place by our feeble slapstick attempts to hover a helicopter.
    In any helicopter there are three sets of controls. The collective lever sits in the left hand. Raising it up adjusts the pitch on all of the blades at the same time. Increasing the angle of attack to the wind through the blades causes the helicopter to rise up. The cyclic stick in the right hand alters the angle of attack of the blades at only one point in the rotor disc, causing the entire disc to tilt forwards, backwards, left or right. The pedals increase or reduce the angle of attack in the tail rotor, whose purpose is to counter the torque or twisting motion of the aircraft. Newton’s laws tell us that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If the main rotor blades are spinning one way, the aircraft fuselage will try to spin the other. The tail rotor prevents this from happening.
    Learning to use any one control at one time is easy enough. The problem is in learning to use all three at the same time. Pulling in power on the collective requires simultaneous use of the pedals to correct the tendency to yaw. But the additional downdraft on the aircraft fuselage means that an adjustment is also needed with the cyclic stick. For the Gazelle, a vertical take-off means lifting the collective, pushing smoothly on the right pedal, and easing the cyclic back and to the right. Now comes the hard part. A movement on the cyclic to tilt the disc also means that the thrust from the disc is no longer vertical. A compensating increase in power is required. Raise the collective lever and all the other controls need further adjustment. And so on. Hence the comedy value of trying and failing to maintain a hover for the first time within an area the size of a football field. Concentrating on adjusting our height above the ground, we would neglect to stop the helicopter from racing sideways across the ground. All of us very quickly became hopelessly