Gunship Over Angola

After six long weeks of intensive ground school, the flying phase started with each pupe being allocated an instructor. Lieutenant Cois Maree was saddled with me.

From the very first minute, the pressure was on and the days became an endless cycle of ground school followed by lengthy preflight briefings, an hour in the air with your instructor trying to impart flying skills, followed by an inevitable 600-metre foray to the assisted ground approach (AGA) beacon as punishment for forgetting some aspect you should have remembered, then another dash to the AGA beacon just because it was there, and so on and on.

Unless a pupe was burdened with his parachute and bone dome (crash helmet) on the way to or from flying, pupes were required to run everywhere, slowing down only briefly to salute a passing officer. I was allocated to Charlie Flight, and our flight commander was the utterly fearsome Captain Trevor Schroder.

As I heard it, Captain Schroder had had a serious air accident a few years previously when the 24 Squadron Blackburn Buccaneer he was flying had entered an irrecoverable stall close to the ground, and he’d delayed ejecting from the doomed aircraft in order to make sure that his navigator crewman had safely ejected first. The momentary delay meant there was insufficient time for Schroder’s parachute to deploy fully before he hit terra firma, and he’d sustained horrific injuries in the process, barely escaping with his life.

The myth doing the rounds among the pupes, no doubt instilled by Captain Schroder’s fellow instructors, had it that in patching him up, the doctors had used so much steel that Schroder actually carried his own compass swing card (each aircraft has its own unique arrangement of magnetic fields and metalwork, which affect the accuracy of magnetic compass readings; the compass swing card is a reference used to correct the inherent errors).

On passing Captain Schroder early one morning on my way to the flight lines, like a good pupe I compliantly slowed to a walk, saluted him and said brightly, ‘Good morning, Captain!’

He did and said nothing until I was a few metres past him, and then an eardrum-shattering roar rent the still air: ‘What did you say, pupe?’ (the last word being accented and spat out with all the contempt he could muster).

Turning around quickly I responded in a quaking voice, ‘I… said… good… morning, Captain.’

‘Well, in future you will just say ‘Morning, Captain!’… and I will decide whether it is a good morning or not!’

Once the flying phase began, for the first 18 hours or so pupes flew with their instructors all the time. The intention of each was, and probably still is, to make the other vomit. The hours were all about learning the basic techniques of flying: turns going up and turns going down, power settings for this and power settings for that, stalls to the left and stalls to the right, and my personal favourite – the spin.

A spin in a conventional aircraft, if the Harvard may be described as such, was described in the old RAF manuals we used as ‘an uncontrolled pitching (up and down), rolling (round and round) and yawing (left and right) motion of the airplane’, all three of which happen simultaneously. Why anyone in their right mind would intentionally try to spin an aircraft while they were aboard is beyond my limited comprehension.

I know that the reason pupes learn to spin aircraft is so that instructors can teach them how to recover from this gut-wrenching, bile-inducing, terror-causing sequence. Let me play my part in pursuit of a better world for all by suggesting that it would surely be better for instructors rather to teach pupes how to avoid spinning in the first place.

Civilian pilots undergoing privately financed flying instruction condense this basic flying phase into less than half the time taken by military pilots. I am convinced that the reason for this is that national servicemen are not on hand to remove the remains of the previous night’s supper from the cockpits of these aircraft. CFS, of course, had no such problem, as there were plenty of national servicemen available. The reason I later applied to fly choppers lies in the fact that a helicopter doesn’t spin – well, not in the sense that a fixed-wing aircraft does.

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Around this time, during a football match against a side from another military unit, I climbed majestically above the packed opposition defence aiming to head a ball goalwards. One defender, who must have been an athletic fellow, was competing for the same ball, but, unlike me, he decided to use his feet in a classic bicycle-kick movement.

We both missed the ball.