Spitfire Women of World War II Read Online Free PDF

the immediate present of gauges, weather, navigation and finding that next landmark’.
    But when the cloud came down, so did the dreadful pall of death. Ferrying aircraft around well-defended Britain was, bizarrely, one of the most lethal activities on offer to either men or women in this war. Nearly one in ten of the ATA’s women pilots died. None of them ever fired a shot in anger because they flew unarmed, so they were sitting ducks should the Luftwaffe happen on them. They could also be shot at by friendly ack-ack units, ensnared by barrage balloons and, at any moment, ambushed by the weather. They flew without radio, and this was tightrope-walking without a safety net: no weather ‘actuals’, no check calls to the nearest RAF or met station, no radio beam to home in on.
    Immediately in front of their joysticks, on Spitfires and almost every other class of aircraft used by the RAF, was the same six-instrument panel: air speed indicator, altimeter, gyro compass, attitude indicator, turn-and-slip gauge and artificial horizon. ATA pilots knew what each instrument did and they used them separately every time they flew. But in the alchemic business of saving their own lives by using these instruments together to work out where they were going when the gloom outside their canopies was thick as concrete – in blind flying – they had no formal training at all. They were told this was to discourage going ‘over the top’ of cloud and generally ugly weather; and they were told this despite the fact that getting down through generally ugly weather is what instrument flying is for. The real reason seems to have been to save time and money, and the cost would be in lives.
    When the Shottesbrooke spire was lost in cloud ATA pilots were not obliged to fly, but they still did. Out of boredom, rivalry, the pressure to deliver aircraft, or sometimes needling from operations officers who were themselves being needled by a chain of command that stretched directly to the Ministry of Aircraft Production and Churchill, they flew in all weathers, convincing themselves that holes would open up and let them down through the great blankets of condensation that kept England so green. They also flew every type of aircraft produced by the Allies. There were nearly 200 of them, from lumbering amphibian Supermarine Walruses to high-altitude reconnaissance Spitfires; from Blenheims and Beaufighters to Mitchells and Mosquitoes, from unsinkable old Tiger Moths to half-baked experiments like the Airacobra, with a rear-mounted engine and a transmission shaft that spun furiously between the pilot’s legs.
    What training the ATA pilots did have was thorough, and they were justly proud of it. It consisted of ground school in meteorology, map-reading, navigation and mechanics, with special classes on where to expect barrage balloons; then dual and solo flights in docile Moths to build confidence for the marginally faster Miles Magisters. In these, recruits were expected to complete no fewer than thirty long cross-country flights along fixed routes, intended to imprint on pilots’ minds a giant aerial picture of England, with particular attention paid to railway lines and Roman roads since these were often the best guides out of trouble. Finally, pilots were assigned to ferry pools for ‘Class I’ ferrying, of light, single-engined planes. For promotion to faster Class II machines and above, all the way up to Class V four-engined bombers, conversion courses were eventually offered at the RAF’s Central Flying School at Upavon in Wiltshire.
    No training programme could familiarise every pilot with every type of plane in the sky. So they familiarised themselves, using a ring-bound set of handling notes prepared by Flight Engineer Bob Morgan of the British Overseas Airways Corporation. Twenty minutes with Morgan’s notes was usually enough to workout what made a Walrus different from a Wellington, but not