by Alan Bristow
At the end of elementary training the survivors moved up the St Lawrence to Kingston, Ontario, for advanced training on the North American AT-6 Harvard. It was harder to wash out now; the government had made a serious investment in you and wanted you to get through. The Harvard looked a hell of a big aeroplane after the Cornell, and with a snarling 550 horsepower Pratt & Whitney radial engine up front it was a serious piece of kit.
I thought I was pretty capable. My instructor was Flt Lt Hodson, and years later, when he was a broker in the City, he came to visit me at home in Surrey and I took him for a flight in my Beech King Air. After we landed, he said: ‘I think the helicopter training must have improved your flying.’ But he never complained at Kingston. The only difficulty I had was keeping her perfectly straight on the runway after landing. I tended to over-control on the rudder, and it took me a while to get it right.
The Harvard was relatively complex, with a retractable undercarriage and a variable pitch propeller. It was a good machine for aerobatics but a bit clumsy in a barrel roll. You had to remember to push the stick forward as you went over, and pull back as you came out of it. You’d come out of a loop, barrel roll in the climb, wingover at the top, I loved it. The spin in the Harvard could wind itself up, and we weren’t allowed to do more than six spins in one direction.
We moved on now to air plots, dead reckoning, map-reading. The terrain around Kingston was flat and featureless, especially when the snow blanked out even the railway lines, but if you got lost you could just fly south to Lake Ontario, then east to the St Lawrence. We had one chap called Dawson who was a hopeless navigator. This man could get out of bed and be lost by the time his feet touched the floor. He, too, came to visit me after the war. I fretted as his estimated time of arrival came and went. Finally, the telephone rang. It was Dawson.
‘I’m in a phone box somewhere. I seem to have missed my way.’
I sent the gardener out to bring him in. He’d gone on to fly Avengers, where he had a co-pilot to guide him, but I’m convinced the only reason he got into a squadron was because he was a magnificent piano player. After the war he went back to doing what he’d been doing before – he was an apprentice at Harrods, in the carpet department. It’s a wonder he could find his way to work.
Dead reckoning was easy as long as you were fastidious about keeping your log. Note your time to the second, hold your speed and heading. When you turn, note down the precise times and headings, and keep the big picture in your mind. If you do that, your only variable is wind drift. The lessons drummed into me at Kingston saved my life in Antarctica, when I was 100 miles out from the ship and it was useful to know your way home. I found it easy to read wind ‘lanes’ on the sea and to calculate drift, and my dead-reckoning position was always plus or minus two miles.
As at St Eugene, we were supposed to be confined to the premises at Kingston, but there was a wooded corner where some bright spark had got to work with the wire cutters. I’m sure the management knew about it but allowed it as a necessary safety valve. Most of us had girlfriends on the outside and would break out whenever the doctored tea was insufficient to curb our youthful urges. But there was a constant reminder of what it was all about. Painted on the hangar wall was an enormous Zero fighter, and its guns seemed to follow you as you went by. I would point my fingers at it as I walked past. Rat-a-tat-tat, I would say. We were only dimly aware of war news. I did get letters, but I treated them casually. I don’t think I gave a damn about anything except what was going on around me. Terrible, really, but I was focussed on getting my wings.
The great day was approaching. My last exercise was a navigation flight, with Hodson in the back to monitor progress. On the way out, he said: ‘Heading 090. I’ll show you the Gananoque Bridge.’
The Gananoque Bridge was an enormous structure between America and Canada, under which Lake Ontario emptied itself into the St Lawrence. ‘I’ve seen it many times, sir,’ I said.
‘Well, how would you like to loop around it?’
‘That’s against the rules, sir.’
‘Absolutely. Now, there’s about a hundred feet of clearance under it, and when you’re going up and over the top, for god’s sake keep it straight or we’ll end up stuck in the stanchions.’
I flew underneath the bridge and pulled up into a loop. If you pointed the Harvard in any direction and didn’t frig about with the rudder it would keep fairly straight, and I went over the top looking ‘up’ at the road-bed just about where I wanted it to be. On the descent, judging the pull-out was easy – we had done so many dive-bombing and machine-gunning exercises that I knew the aircraft well. We flashed under the bridge a second time.
‘Do another one,’ Hodson commanded. So I did.
‘Now you can really say you’ve qualified at Kingston,’ Hodson said as we were walking away from the aircraft. ‘Have you done any night aerobatics?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Meet me in the ops room this evening.’
We flew the Harvard north, away from the trainees who were doing night circuits and bumps. There was a thin moon, and we had the lights of a small village to guide us. I did some rolls, loops, a spin, a roll out of a loop, barrel rolls and snap rolls. Hodson looked at the fuel gauge and decided it was time to go home.
Kingston had a light beacon, so you couldn’t miss it unless your name was Dawson. We flew into the overhead at 4,000 feet.
‘Ever do any inverted flying at night?’ asked Hodson.
‘I’ve never done any inverted flying at all, sir.’
‘Okay, roll it on its back.’ I did so, stick well forward, and snowy Kingston slid slowly over our heads. After about twenty seconds I discovered that the Pratt & Whitney R985 radial engine did not like flying upside down – the carburettor was not set up for it – and with a splutter, it stopped.
‘Oo-er,’ said Hodson. ‘I have control. Quick – hit the Ki-gas!’
He rolled us the right way up. The Harvard had a Ki-gas fuel primer pump in the front cockpit, and to start the engine one pushed the pump and hit the starter button. When the engine was hot it was a swine to start, and on this night it didn’t want to know.
‘It won’t start, sir.’
We were descending at 800 feet a minute. ‘Better get the canopy open,’ said Hodson. ‘If she doesn’t start I’ll turn her over again. Get ready to jump out.’
This news shook me, and I redoubled my efforts on the pump. With a scant 1,500 feet of air left below us, the big radial burst into life. We flew a couple of normal circuits in case anybody had been watching – the aviation equivalent of whistling while walking insouciantly away from some terrible wreck – and landed.
‘Do you want me to log that as inverted engine-off night flying, sir?’ I asked innocently as we walked to the instructors’ offices.
‘You stupid bugger, you’ll get me the sack,’ said Hodson. And no more was said about it.
The course had dwindled to about twenty men when we were awarded our wings in a perfunctory ceremony in which the CO gave them to us in our hands – there wasn’t much to pin them to on a zip-front bell-bottomed suit. There were a couple of tailors’ shops in downtown Kingston, and if you were a standard size you could get your uniform next day. And then you were a pilot.
I had three particularly close friends at Kingston, Cliff Penfold, Harry Little and Eric Andrews. In fact we were virtually joined at the hip because we’d jointly invested in a dreadful-looking Ford Model-A Sedan, and none of us could afford to buy the others out. We became friends for life. Cliff, who later bellied a Hellcat into a paddy field in the Far East, had been a clerk in the Bank of India. Harry was a New Zealander whose father was something in the wool market. Eric had very fine features, almost like a girl, and he’d been apprenticed to a firm of accountants before the war. We were all rated above average as pilots, particularly Eric, who was a natural. It was taken as read that we would get our pick of the postings. Seafires, probably, Hellcats if they didn’t have any – fast fig
hters, right at the top of the Navy pilot’s career tree. As we strutted around in our brand new uniforms, we were called in to see the CO.
‘I need four volunteers to learn to fly helicopters,’ he said.
Helicopters? We’d never even seen one. We’d heard about them – they had a propeller on the roof, and you could overtake them on a bicycle. No sir, we were Seafire men, flying off carriers and sleeping with the prettiest girls.
The CO waited silently. So did we.
‘Well?’ he asked. ‘Bristow?’
Silence.
The CO looked at each of us in turn, lips pursed.
‘Dismissed!’ he shouted.
Next day, our postings came through. Sub-Lieutenants Bristow, Little, Andrews and Penfold were ordered to Floyd Bennett Field, New York, to learn to fly the Sikorsky YR-4B helicopter.
CHAPTER 7
Introduction to Helicopters
We drove into New York State in the old Ford and came to a beautiful place called Skaneateles Lake, a town of clapboard houses in the Finger Lakes. We decided to put in for a couple of days, and there I met a young lady who was very good looking and a particularly good sailor. I wasn’t a bad sailor myself, and we ended up spending a lot of time together, much of it on the lake. Her father was a director of a big air conditioning company, Carrier, and for some reason he approved of me. I went on seeing her for some months while I was in New York, and I thought something might come of it. But she was very anxious to get married early in life, and I wasn’t. She married a US Marine, which was a disappointment to me.
In the dog days of August we drove down the Hudson Valley into New York City, which could not have presented a greater contrast to the England of 1944. There was no rationing, lights blazed everywhere, and it was stifling hot. After a night of comfort in the Brabazon Plaza Hotel on 59th Street the four of us were ordered to report to the senior officer in charge of the Royal Navy helicopter unit at Floyd Bennett Field, a Coast Guard air station in Brooklyn. Floyd Bennett lay on the edge of Jamaica Bay, fringed on the east by a glorious sandy beach called Rockaway.
We wanted to stick together because of the car, and we couldn’t afford to pay much for accommodation. We started off with a cramped apartment in Brooklyn, but the noise after dark was horrendous and we had to park the car on the street. Our search took us to Flatbush, where we rented an apartment on the top floor of a four-storey building in a quieter avenue. It had three bedrooms, but they seemed to have forgotten to insulate the roof against the abominable New York heat, and the place was virtually uninhabitable. We pooled our meagre resources and bought an air conditioner – Carrier – which made life a little more bearable. Navy allowances were never enough to cover the cost of accommodation, and we had to dig deep into our basic pay to find the rent.
The old Ford had breathed its last, and we were forced to take a hot and uncomfortable bus to the airfield every day. We resolved this problem by buying one wheel each of a second-hand Chevrolet from a chap called Montgomery who was one of the helicopter manufacturer Sikorsky’s design team supporting the training operation. Floyd Bennett was a busy airfield operating the latest American naval fighters as well as Grumman Goose and Widgeon reconnaissance seaplanes, which used wide ramps to taxi down into Jamaica Bay. There were big hangars for twin-engined Tigercat fighters and Avenger torpedo bombers, which seemed to be in the air constantly, and in the midst of the hubbub the Royal Navy establishment occupied a chain of prefabricated huts. All US Coast Guard operations at Floyd Bennett were under the command of Commander Frank A. Erickson, who delegated his authority to Lieutenant Commander Peat RNVR to manage the helicopter training school for British pilots. Relations with the Americans were excellent, to the extent that the British trainees were taken on anti-submarine patrols up and down the Atlantic coast of America in the flying boats.
The first time I saw a helicopter I was walking with Penfold, Little and Andrews from the car park outside the base to the RN huts. It sat behind a prefab, blades drooping, looking more like a tent than an aircraft in its dull camouflage paint. With stalky legs and bulky wheels, it sure did look flimsy.
‘I’m not bloody flying that,’ said Harry Little. But he was wrong.
It was called, we quickly learned, a Sikorsky YR-4. We were thrown into learning to fly it, but my eyes were firmly fixed across the Atlantic where my colleagues from Kingston were by now converting onto Seafires and Hellcats. In my desperation to get out of flying helicopters I had written to my father asking him to intercede with the powers-that-be to get me transferred to Seafires, where I belonged. I received a telegram bearing his baleful reply:
‘Do your duty.’
My first flight in the R-4 – the Hoverfly, as the Navy called it – came on 4 August 1944 and lasted thirty-five minutes. It all seemed fairly logical and straightforward, and the machine did what you wanted it to do. I felt at home with it the second time I flew it, but I made a conscious effort to get kicked off the course, stirring the cyclic control stick and clumping a heavy foot on the pedals so the helicopter jolted and jittered through the air. I didn’t like doing it, and it didn’t fool my instructor, Lieutenant Jeffries.
‘Stop mucking about, Bristow,’ he said.
I didn’t get on with Jeffries; he wasn’t very good at explaining or answering questions. We rubbed each other up the wrong way for seven fractious hours in the air, and he must have been relieved when he finally got out and sent me solo. I flew resentfully, slowly, and with no respect for the machine. But after my first solo flight, it all changed.
I was given a new instructor, Flight Lieutenant John Bradbury, a man who had an outstanding wartime record of flying autogyros on special missions behind enemy lines. He was an unconventional instructor who enjoyed the work and knew his stuff, and we got on famously in the air and on the ground. Just after I’d gone solo, Bradbury announced he wanted to go swimming at Rockaway Beach and said he needed me to fly him there in an R-4. He’d had a rope ladder fixed to the helicopter, and on the way he explained the plan: ‘You hover while I jump out and have a swim, you fly up and down the beach for ten minutes, come back when I wave, I climb up the ladder and you fly me back.’
Fair enough. He disembarked into the ocean from about ten feet up, and I flew along the beach awaiting his wave. When it came I dropped the ladder, but he could do no more than hook himself onto the bottom few rungs and cling on while I dangled him back to the airfield. We landed in front of the Navy buildings, and nobody batted an eyelid.
The four of us from Kingston were joined on No. 2 Helicopter Course by Len Page, a Canadian ex-Walrus pilot, and a Lieutenant Taylor. It came as a surprise to us when we learned, about halfway through the course, that our instructors had come straight from No. 1 Helicopter Course and were far from expert themselves. Like John Bradbury, many of them had previous experience of autogyros in the RAF – Basil Arkell, Reggie Brie and Jimmy Harper were joined by a naval contingent of Lieutenants Jeffries, Albury, Fuller and Lieutenant Commander Peat – and many of these men were instrumental in establishing the helicopter industry in Britain after the war.
Under Flight Lieutenant Bradbury’s tutelage I became a proficient helicopter pilot and, to my surprise, began to enjoy the idea of flying helicopters off merchant ships in search of U-boats. Little, Penfold and Andrews had never been as antagonistic to helicopters as I, and they too were enjoying themselves. Penfold was positively enthusiastic, Little slightly less so. Eric Andrews was so laid back he couldn’t care whether he passed or failed, but because he was a natural pilot he was better than any of us. He became chairman of Charrington Brewery after the war, but got TB and died relatively young. His death was a big loss.
The theory of helicopter aerodynamics was quite well known, partly from experience with autogyros. Unlike helicopters, autogyros have no power to their rotors, which windmill in the airflow creating lift while a propeller hauls the aircraft along. But powered rotors behave in similar ways, and we were lectured in the classroom on
their properties. I can’t say I found it gripping.
In practice, I found helicopters logical and quite easy to fly. The R-4 had the control layout that became standard on almost all helicopters; a collective lever at your left hand, like the handbrake in a car, was raised or lowered to climb or descend, and it had a motorcycle-type twist grip throttle on the end to make sure the engine revs stayed up when you used power to climb. The foot pedals increased or decreased the thrust of the tail rotor to yaw the nose left or right, and acted in the same sense as an aeroplane rudder. The azimuth stick in your right hand, which was also called the cyclic, tilted the main rotor in the direction you wanted to go, and again, it operated in the same sense as a plane’s joystick.
The YR-4 was grossly underpowered by modern standards, and if there were two people on board you could just about get off the ground with a full fuel tank. It was very unstable on the ground and had been designed with a wide undercarriage to help it stay the right way up on landing. I learnt the vortex ring state, when you can’t pull out of a descent because the air is in such turmoil around the blades that they can’t create enough lift, was quite safe if you started the exercise with enough altitude. Fortunately, if perhaps surprisingly, we all got through the course without mishap. It began to appeal to me that you could stop in mid-air, perhaps to pick up someone in the water, but I still yearned after fighters and never stopped bemoaning my lot.