Never Fear

by Ian Strathcarron

  Don’t jerk your tail so suddenly, or one day in long grass you’ll trip and nose over.

  Stop swivelling all over the field. Watch a point on the horizon and take off straight.

  If you take off before you get up your flying speed, the slightest gust of wind will stall you and you will write off the undercarriage.

  Again I say, the regulations state you must not turn until 500 yards beyond the aerodrome perimeter.

  You are still turning with too much rudder and not enough bank.

  Keep your nose down turning. Your nose is too high, you’ve too much bank, you’ve not enough rudder and you are side slipping. You’re asking for a spin.

  Watch your speed while turning. You’ll lose flying speed and hit the deck before you can recover it.

  Make all your controlled movements smooth. You’re jerking the kite about like a washing-machine.

  Then the time comes for Francis to practise an emergency landing.

  Pickthorn: ‘Cut back your engine. Widen your approach as you are obviously overshooting. Watch your speed on your turns. Try to keep the speed at a steady 60 miles an hour when landing. You have slight rudder on all the time and your left wing is too low. You have flattened much too soon. Put on your engine and go round again.’

  Francis tries again. Pickthorn becomes even more anxious: ‘Man alive, can’t you see you’re headed straight for the fence? More engine, quickly.’

  At lesson’s end Francis has to land. ‘Bump!’ he reports, ‘The wretched machine hits the ground and rebounds fifty feet into the air’.

  ‘For the love of Mike!’ (Pickthorn again) ‘Put on your engine when you do that or you’ll wipe off the undercarriage by dropping back stalled on the deck.’

  Francis’s day finishes thus:

  You then make the world’s worst landing in a series of wild rabbit hops. The instructor (what a life!) inspects to see what damage is done. If you are permitted to try another landing, the result will be much the same. At the end of the day, after the humiliating spectacle provided by fellow student, who, with only a third of the instructions you have heard, makes seven perfect landings in succession, you crawl humbly home, the sorriest dog in the world, unable adequately to conceal your tail between your legs.

  But – now here’s a funny thing. Once Francis had his licence, which he eventually gained on 28 August 1929, his flying came on, as it were, in leaps and bounds. It was if the gods, prescient as ever, had meant him only ever to fly solo. Once aloft alone he was soon singing in the bath:

  Next morning I was up with the lark, and make a sorry imitation of him in the bath. I set off for the aerodrome with the nearest resemblance of a rush. Bursting with confidence I board a plane.

  At last I make good three-point landings in succession. It is the same as being in love: your heart swells with love for your neighbour, the drone of the Cirrus engine no longer suggests incipient engine-knock with every beat, you forget your creditors, the world is at your feet, flying is child’s play. It is incredible that you should ever have imagined it difficult. Your fancy flies ahead, you work out how you consider the control should be moved for a slow roll or half roll off the top of a loop: the intricacies of flying no longer hold any terrors. In short, complete happiness is your portion.

  It was enough happiness to make the purchase with de Havilland and on 8 September Francis took the train up to Stag Lane airfield near Enfield to take delivery of his own Gipsy Moth. G-AAKK cost £650, payable on instalments, and the deposit alone used up pretty much all his short-term funds. (Today a Gipsy Moth costs about £100,000 and one with a bit of history well north of that.)

  Having got the hang of flying, Francis now had to learn how to navigate. He didn’t know it yet but he was about to find his métier – and so the words fairly flew off his typewriter:

  What about navigation? Suppose I couldn’t navigate across country? The first time I ventured away from the aerodrome was most exciting. At first everything was a jumble; then I picked out a railway line, the Thames, the Staines reservoir. With the aid of the map I found Byfleet. Flying at a snail’s pace, I recognised other landmarks shown on the map. Thrill, excitement, joy! If I could do that much the first day, competence must be a matter only of practice and experience.

  The aeroplane was so new that it had not yet been fitted with a compass. I was ‘flying by Bradshaw’, following the railway lines across country, and I wondered if I could fly by the sun. The sky was overcast, with ten-tenths at 1,000 feet. I climbed up into the cloud, and proceeded until I had passed through a 9,000 feet layer of it to emerge at 10,000 feet in brilliant sunshine over a snowy white field of cloud. Not only had I no compass, but no blind-flying instruments at all. I reckoned that if I got into trouble I could force the plane into a spin, and that it was bound to spin round the vertical axis, and that therefore I should be sure to emerge vertically from the cloud.

  After flying along for half an hour by the sun, I climbed down through the 9,000-foot layer of cloud. I then wanted to find out how accurately I had carried out this manoeuvre, and I used a sound principle of navigation. I fixed my position by the easiest method available – I flew round a railway station low down, and read the name off the platform. By some extraordinary fluke I was right on course. I probably uttered for the first time the navigator’s famous cry ‘Spot on!’

  ‘Spot on!’ It was to become Francis’s calling card, muttered sotto voce to himself when his sextant confirmed his dead reckoning after an Atlantic storm, quietly to Sheila on seeing their first lighthouse on the Western Approaches, at the top of his voice alone to Elijah on landfall over Darwin, and a thousand times besides; always with a hint of pride and surprise, no trumpets to blow – especially in public - but, still, the spot-on sound of Francis in heaven.

  Like a child with a new toy, he now set about putting Elijah to good use. First he flew up to Liverpool for a rendezvous with an actress. Bafflingly to him, she wasn’t impressed with either Francis or Elijah. He turned around and followed a different railway line down to Bristol, then flew west along the north Devon coast to Barnstaple and up his home valley to Shirwell, buzzed the Old Rectory a couple of times and landed at Youlston Park. It was his homecoming after ten years.

  Youlston Park, scene of Francis’s airborne homecoming

  That visit home was not a success. Francis had every reason to feel proud of himself. He had left on foot with £10 in his pocket and returned with a fortune – albeit a bit theoretical right now – and flying his own kite. This genteel Devon clergy-squire poverty all seemed so unnecessary. He was disillusioned by the incipient decay of a running-down household after the spick and span of New World homesteads and gardens. Their talk was of who had missed Mass; his thoughts were of record-breaking flights across the world. He now had the confidence to rebel against his father, subtly. Dinners were still held in silence after Grace; he broke that taboo, even if one-sidedly. He laid on the Kiwi accent, which he could tell grated. He boasted of his fortune, knowing that this would annoy them further.

  Worst sin of all came when he wanted to buy a wreath for his recently deceased great-aunt, Jinny. The other wreaths already there were small and discreet – and no doubt inexpensive, if not homemade – and fitting in with the scale of a Devon village. Out of devilment Francis bought an enormous, ostentatiously expensive wreath, which eclipsed all the others. He wrote: ‘I think that wreath upset my family more than anything else I did; they thought I must be a frightful barbarian to produce such an unusual thing.’

  And then the next day he crashed. He had been giving joyrides. After one, with his younger sister Cecily on board, one of the wheels touched down in a rabbit burrow and then went on to meet the steep side of a cart track; the wheels stopped turning but the plane kept moving. The hole in the fuselage looked bad at first but the damage was more to his pride than the airframe or Cecily. He quickly found the family carpenter – and his boyhood sparring partner – George Moore, and together they repaired the airframe�
��s broken ribs and added some fresh ones. The next day Francis and Elijah were flying again, this time the passenger being the old family retainer, Wilkie. Clearly terrified by the whole experience, he reminded Francis on alighting that twenty-eight years ago to this very day he had ridden to Barnstaple to fetch a doctor so that Francis could make his very first landing with the midwife. Of all the Old Rectory household, only Wilkie remembered that day was Francis’s birthday.

  And then he crashed again. After an exhilarating flight back from Devon to Brooklands in a 35 mph wind, he put Elijah down at the second attempt and then made a classic novice’s mistake: he taxied crosswind and a gust got under the windward wing and lifted her on to the leeward wing-tip. That tip crumpled and another gust levered her up into the air until Francis ‘found myself in the undignified position of dangling in the safety-belt and looking down at the ground ten feet below me’.

  It took fifty hours in the rigging shop to mend the damage but it was time well spent. Francis still didn’t know whether he was still long-term rich or just short-term poor; he did know right now that he couldn’t afford to have the chippies and riggers mend it: he had to learn to do it himself under their supervision, much to the chippies’ and riggers’ amusement – not just at his craftsmanship but the fact that a pilot was actually working on his plane himself.

  Francis could not afford any more crashes and by now it was clear that there was more to this flying lark than larking about. He set about a self-imposed, self-instructed intensive training period. He practised landing in crosswinds and even upwinds. He planted a marker ten yards inside a fence and went round and round until his landings got closer and closer and he eventually landed on it. For half an hour a day he practised forced landings. He learned basic aerobatics, lining himself up with a railway line for accuracy of execution. Much as he had learned skiing in New Zealand, by ‘falling, falling, falling’, he learned to fly in Surrey by landing, landing, landing.

  A month later, on 3 October, his compass arrived and he began feeding navigation skills into his daily training routine. By 15 October he was ready for his first night flight, lit only by moonlight. He was in his own kind of paradise:

  I had a feeling of complete isolation and solitariness, and the thousands of lights below intensified the feeling of being completely cut off. I looped, and did a few stall turns for the same reason a dog barks at something which scares him.

  When Francis was not flying he was back at Aunt Mary’s in Knightsbridge, planning the trip that would break Hinkler’s record to Australia. There was a conjunction of time and money to consider. He worked out, for reasons that are not entirely obvious, that the best time to attempt the flight was the shortest day at departure and the longest day at arrival – so ideally to cross the Equator around 21 December, two months away. A last-ditch hope Francis had of funds from the business in New Zealand had fallen flat with a telegram from Geoffrey Goodwin: ‘Advise selling plane. Expensive salvage Malay aerodromes. No more money possible. All reserves used up. Expected £2,000 loan unavailable.’

  Alongside this conjunction were two further considerations. The attempt to fly solo to Australia was not new – but it was riddled by failure. His licence was only two months old, his solo hours still only in double figures. Much better pilots than Francis had failed – and died failing - in the attempt. The first successful flight was ten years before, in 1919, and took four weeks and two days. Either side of that, one pilot had crashed in Bali in sight of the finish and another at Surbiton in sight of the start. In the five attempts since then, and before Hinkler’s record the year before – 1928 – there had been crashes in Corfu, Crete and Turin and two crash-delayed successes, one taking five months and the other seven months. Since Hinkler there had been two more attempts, one crashing in France, the other in Australia. A betting man would have found a willing bookie hard to find.

  Conjoining this reality check was a more fantastical notion: he had discovered flying, flying had discovered him, and together they wanted more, more, more. He came up with a wizard wheeze to gain experience and not use up too much of the dwindling cash: he and Elijah would spend November burnishing their wings with what Francis called ‘a trial spin around Europe’. He was to recall that:

  That trip was a great experience for me. In twenty-five days I visited eight countries. Of twenty-eight landings, eight were in fields. [He means here farming fields as opposed to airfields.] Of these eight landings, three were for fun, two caused by fog, and three caused by fog and darkness combined and made in an urgent hurry. I got away with all except one, yet not without some abominably close shaves.

  And so the trial spin, the ‘great sport’, came to pass. The insurance company insisted that an experienced pilot should go with him, as the plane was still in hock. They nominated Joe King, recently arrived back from aerial survey work in Bolivia. Joe and Francis very nearly wrote themselves off in the first minute.

  ‘Let’s go!’ said Joe from the front seat as he pushed the throttle wide open at first, frosty light. Francis assumed that Joe, as the senior pilot, wanted to take her off himself. They both thought they were an unusually long time leaving the ground; eventually they climbed just high enough to clear the Brooklands banking and the trees on St George’s Hill.

  ‘What on earth do you think you are doing?’ shouted Joe through the speaking tube.

  ‘I’m doing nothing,’ Francis shouted back, ‘I never even touched the controls.’

  ‘Nor did I!’ Joe yelled back.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ they both said to themselves.

  Actually this incident has passed into aviation folklore. I remember being told of it when learning to fly, to bring home the importance of the instructor saying ‘You have control’ and some time later, with relief in his voice, ‘I have control.’

  Francis had not flown over water before and naturally enough wanted some engine-failure gliding distance over the English Channel. He settled into the cross-Channel cruise over Lydd in Kent at 6,000 feet. I also remember from my flying lessons that you lose 3 degrees Celcius every 1,000 feet you climb. It was still early morning in early November and let’s say it was 8 degrees ambient, so at 6,000 feet they were flying in minus 10 degrees Celcius into a 75 mph wind. I can’t work out the wind chill factor but you get the p-p-picture.

  It wasn’t long before Joe was complaining bitterly about being turned into an icicle. He insisted they land and recover and Francis touched down in Abbeville, just off the Boulogne–Paris railway line. They both had a couple of warming Cognac stiffeners and resumed to the Paris refuelling stop. By now Joe had warmed up enough to fall fast asleep in the front cockpit but by Paris he’d had enough, made some excuse about looking up an old female business friend and scarpered – possibly back to the safety of aerial surveying in Bolivia.

  On Francis flew, following the railways and the Rhône down to north of Marseilles and then east along the Riviera coast, checking progress on Tourisme aérien: Carte générale aéronautique internationale aviation maps, cut into strips and concertina-folded by Stanford’s on Long Acre, Covent Garden, whose shop still thrives there today. (Stanford’s archives can still be seen in the Royal Geographic Society.)

  The beach at Nice, Francis’s refuelling stop

  Passengers today at L’Aéroport Nice Côte d’Azur will find it hard to imagine, but on the evening of 3 November 1929, in order to refuel Francis had to land on the Beau Rivage beach, thumb a lift from a passing car into town and return with his tins of petrol in a taxi. He then rounded up two strollers from the Promenade des Anglais to hold the wing-tips while he ran her up and, waving a cheery ‘au revoir’, opened up her to take off along beach again.

  He flew around the Piedmont to Milan, refuelled and then overnighted in Venice. Leaving Trieste to the east and en route to Ljubljana in what was Yugoslavia, he hit sudden fog. Ahead there were first signs of darkness: ‘I had to land in one big and violent hurry.’ Below him were cultivated strips of land, each one tiny, in
the Napoleonic manner. He had to choose the least worse one – but as soon as Elijah’s wheels touched down they sank into the bog and stopped while the rest of Elijah carried on for a few more seconds. For the second time in two months Francis found himself suspended 10 feet above the ground looking down on a broken prop. He had to wait ten days in Nova vas pri Rakeku for the new prop to arrive. The villagers were wonderfully hospitable and carried Elijah over to a better strip so that the village chief could be taken for a joyride, the least Francis felt he could do to thank them.

  It was during that night that Francis had the first of what would become recurring, identical nightmares. He would be flying Elijah when suddenly he lost all vision – a white-out – with all certainty gone except the coming crash. The engine noise continued, only sight was lost. He would awake with a start each time, not sleepily, realising that he had just had a nightmare, but violently, upright and in distress. I asked a friend who is a practising psychiatrist and her interpretation was that the nightmare was a mental relief valve against the suppressed fear of crashing from a height, so not an instant death crash, over instantly, but an inevitably fatal descent from height.

  The locals were less welcoming on his next forced landing. Having passed through Belgrade and Iasi on the River Prut, he was making for Czernowitz, just inside Ukraine, when again simultaneous darkness and fog got the better of him. Down he came forcefully in Codaesti in Moldavia. He was immediately surrounded by sheepskin-clad, fierce-looking gypsies brandishing firearms of questionable provenance. They had never seen a plane before and were soon poring over it. Francis worried that they were about to ‘slice Elijah up into small pieces suitable for interior decoration’. Luckily a French-speaking officer rode up and restored order. Less luckily, they then discussed the advisability of shooting Francis on the spot for being a Bolshevik spy from across the border. Francis said he had not eaten all day and could they delay the execution till at least his stomach was full. The gypsies soon knocked up a goulatsch; over the meal the ice melted and Francis was spared the bullet, if not the indigestion.