Classic British Flight Sim

Ralph, we had a guy here last year who flies Austers including an AOP9 (your old one perhaps) with an Auster group in the West Country.
The AOP9 was a super machine, have you read the book 'Fly like a Bird' that featured AOP9 flying in the AAC and is one of the best flying books I have ever read.
The author is Alex Kimbell and the book is at Amazon.com.

Trev, Yes, that is where my old lady is now. The MK9 was absolutely ideal for jungle work as in Malaya. It did not have the performance of the Bird Dog at the top end, but at low speeds I don’t think there was any other fixed wing military aircraft to touch it. Of course it came at the fag end before the helicopters took over. I have a copy of the short field trials that were done and I’ll dig it out some time and summarise it. The figures are remarkable.

And yes, I have read ‘Fly like a Bird’ – a great book. Another interesting book is the soft cover ‘Rearsby Revisited’ (1995) by Les Leetham, who was both a fitter and test pilot (!) for Austers under Ranald Porteous. He did the first spinning test on the prototype and it really gave him something to think about. Very un-Auster like, after entry, the nose came up and it went into a flat spin. He tried all sorts of ways of stirring the porridge and he was thinking about jumping out, when the nose pitched down and he was able to make a normal recovery. In the confusion, he was not clear about which action had actually put the nose down. The prototype that he was flying had neither the dorsal fin nor the strakes which were added after this escapade

Hello Keith. Yes I have turned to flight simulators now that my flying days are over. Obviously it’s not a full substitute but it is real pleasure to bumble about looking at the VFR add-on scenery from a couple of thousand feet and going over my old haunts again. Regarding the Kazunori Ito MK9, thank you. I have had it downloaded for some time now. It is amazing that he produced it in a couple of weeks (there’s some correspondence on this at sim-outhouse). I’ve got it on FS2002 and it seems to fly reasonably OK, but on FS2004, the little bugger won’t leave the ground. I haven’t got the experience to start digging into the .cfg and .air files. Perhaps someone has solved the problem by now. Incidentally, the bitmap that has been put into all the cockpits (4 versions) is that from XR240. The right hand side is completely fictitious. There was this damned big hole on that side where the A62 H.F. set was supposed to be. I think the army removed them because they were still current issue and they didn’t want the IRA to get hold of them, something like that. Anyway, I was fortunate to have a small factory at that time so I designed what you see and got a couple my chaps to knock out the parts. I then assembled them into the airframe. It’s a bit strange seeing it again.

Ralph

Many thanks for your reply Ralph, it appears that you have had quite an interesting involvement with aviation and one that I think every-one will certainly enjoy reading.

The Auster that I flew in had the Gipsy Moth engine, I honestly swear that the Auster is partly to blame for my deafness.........apart from the Vulcans of course!!

Regards Nigel

Back to The War

Prior to 3 September 1939 there had been several events that had stirred the Government into thinking and doing ahead. There was the Anschluss with Austria then the occupation of the Czech Sudetenland and then Munich. Although young, we were well aware of the tension building up over the period 1938-9. Late 1938/early 1939 we had each been issued with a gas mask in a cardboard box and also Anderson Shelters had been erected in everyone’s garden. These were paid for by local councils but because it was not a statutory requirement to provide them, many councils chose not to do so. So there were large areas of London, for example, that had no individual shelters.

The Anderson Shelter was designed by Dr David Anderson and it consisted of a number of corrugated iron sheets (galvanised) to form basically an arch with end plates, the whole thing being bolted together and weighing about 800 lbs. Ideally, the shelters should have been sunk into the ground to about half height and then covered with sand bags with some sort of protection for the rectangular aperture at one end which was the ‘door’. In Hull I think the ground was chalk under the topsoil and so they could not sink them. Instead they went down to the chalk and added about 6 inches of concrete to the top and sides. They were supposed to accommodate 4 persons in a ground plan 6 feet x 4 feet 6 inches. Cost was £5. So these things were all over the place serving as a reminder of what was to come. I have gone on about this shelter quite a bit. The reason will be seen later in Liverpool.

We were in Lincoln on that fateful day and the air raid siren had already been sounded, over the whole country I believe. It later transpired that a single French civilian aircraft, meandering towards Croydon with no flight plan filed, had set off the alarm. We were due to return to Hull that day. However, there had been a lot of talk about the vulnerability of Hull as an easy target for bombers crossing the North Sea from Germany. So our parents decided that we kids should stay in Lincoln whilst they returned. In the 3 days, 1st, 2nd and 3rd Sept., 600,000 people, mostly children, were evacuated from London alone!

Xmas 1939 and the phoney war was well established. There had been very little German air activity and so our parents decided to take us back to Hull. Yes, you’ve guessed it. Early in the new year the raiding started.

When the warning sirens sounded, which was mostly at night, we all used to scurry into the shelter in complete blackout, light the candles and try and make ourselves as comfortable as possible. The shelter, being cold metal was soon streaming with condensation. Worse than that, when my Dad was working at night, the couple next door always asked if they could join us in our shelter. He was OK but he had a very peculiar wife who gave me the creeps. But the worst thing was he used bring his bloody mongrel ‘GEORGE’, with him. Every time there was a bang outside, and there were plenty, this sodding animal started to panic and bark and howl like hell - in 6ft x 4ft 6 ins!! He used to try and stuff a sedative pill down its throat but we always found it on the shelter floor next day, We heard AA guns in those early days as well as the drone of bombers overhead. Occasionally you would hear the scream of bombs falling followed by the explosions. This was frightening when you heard a stick of the things exploding and the bangs were getting louder and louder. Apparently, this raiding was relatively light though it did not seem that way to us. The raids on Hull were sporadic and it was not blitzed until 1941, when we were no longer there. Trouble was, you never knew if you going to be in the shelter for one hour or twelve hours. The Germans used to send over relays of single bombers who would shed their bombs and then just hang around making sure you got no sleep.

One night there was a yell from somebody outside the shelter (some people used to stand outside wearing tin helmets and hoping that the shrapnel from the AA shells that was hitting the roofs, would not catch them) ‘They’ve got one! Come and look.’ We got out just in time to see this flaming mass going down vertically in the distance and I remember that a green flare appeared at the side of it before it disappeared.

Shrapnel, if you have never seen it is the most evil looking piece of metal imaginable. Often semi-split into shards, each part of it covered in spikes and razor edges. Guaranteed to cut through anything human. We used to pick up bits of it off the streets after a raid.

One spectacular event that I vividly remember was the day that we had a thunderstorm. Unfortunately the balloon barrage was up and then the lightning came. Those balloons were very vulnerable lightning conductors and when one was struck you a small point of flame on the skin, but then it rapidly grew into a massive ball of flame, the skin burned rapidly and became a falling mass of charred fabric whilst the cable snaked lazily downwards. On that day I saw 4 strikes before the crews were able to wind the rest down. Those crews were in a lot of danger when that happened both from the lightning and the falling cables.

The bombing continued through the spring and early summer. Sometimes bombs landed fairly close to us. I think that the closest was about 400 yards away from our house. Whenever a bomb landed on a house you heard this loud noise of the bricks and masonry collapsing.

One day there was a daylight raid and although there was no enemy activity in our area, when the sirens sounded my mother sent me off to bring back my brother who was playing on some open ground well away from the house. I had just spotted him and I heard this aircraft coming. I looked up and there was a Hurricane at about 400ft (I estimate that now because I remember the amount of detail that I could see) just under the low cloud. We heard later that an enemy raider had been downed just off Spurn Head, a few miles away. Whether it was that Hurricane that got it I do not know.

Because of the large increase in the armed forces, the Military Police needed more accommodation for their naughty boys. It was decided that Hull Prison would become a military glasshouse and so all the civilian inmates and staff were dispersed around the country to other prisons. My Dad was transferred to Liverpool and we arrived in that city sometime in late August 1940 to stay in temporary accommodation until a house in the prison quarters became available. We exchanged news with our landlady on that day and told her about the numerous raids that we had experienced. ‘Oh’, she said, ‘we haven’t had a single raid in Liverpool since the war started.

Yes, you’ve guessed it! That night they had their first of many, many raids.

To be continued . . . .

Ralph

Not All Rats Are Bad

So here we were in the city of Liverpool. It was late August 1940, right in the middle of the Battle of Britain, and we didn’t know a thing about it. Whatever was going on in the South was not seen as a momentous event. Indeed, many of the people who took part in it were unaware of its importance. Very odd because I am one of those people who have long believed that it was the most crucial battle of the war and those Brave Few, together with the far-sighted planners, saved Western Civilisation from sinking into unimaginable barbarism. It’s no good the Germans saying that they really didn’t intend to invade England when the Luftwaffe lost 1700+ of its front line aircraft. If there was no real intent, what was it all for? The fact is they could not accept that they had been thoroughly thrashed, in ‘a near run thing’. They then, of course, turned to serious night bombing.

We soon moved into our new quarters on prison land, a substantial gas-lit Victorian house, complete with cellar and third along in a terrace of six. Behind the back garden were a few allotments, maybe 60 feet in depth. Next was a railway cutting, maybe another 60 feet wide, a small path and then the outer prison wall. The prison itself was in Walton, to the north of which was the Aintree racecourse, but more importantly, to the west, about a mile away was Bootle, with its docks. We didn’t know that the latter would be one of the prime targets of the Luftwaffe, along with Birkenhead with its shipyards.

The houses had been provided with Anderson shelters. They were half submerged and were placed in the garden adjacent to the straight path that led to the back gate. Between the path and the light wooden fence was a narrow strip of earth (garden) 2-3 feet wide. The same pattern was repeated next door so that the two entrances to the shelters faced each other across the fence, 10-12 feet apart. Please bear with me. It’s all relevant.

We started to experience much heavier raids than those on Hull. And they were longer. There were considerably more bombs being dropped, all screaming, and more and more were coming down in sticks, sometimes the noise got less more often it seemed they got louder at each successive bang. These raids started in late August and carried on at intervals throughout September. We spent a lot of the night in the shelter, trying to sleep, but also having to do homework by candlelight for I had just started at new grammar school and being bombed was no excuse. At that time the raids seemed to occur every other night.

The first all-night blitz was at the end of November. It started at about 7 pm and lasted until early morning. It just went on and on with several hundred bombers taking part. A big AA gun had been mounted on a wagon and travelled up and down the adjacent railway line. We could hear the gun crew swearing as they fired off their rounds. There was an enormous amount of noise during these raids, screaming bombs, explosions, AA fire, aircraft engines, fire engines, etc. Sleep was very, very difficult as you huddled down in those little steel boxes.

The next major raid was on the 20th December and again this lasted all night. We were shattered the next day but at least it was a Saturday and I didn’t have to go to school. The Luftwaffe often raided the same target twice on successive nights and this was the case with the next raid being on the 21 December 1940. Previously, during an earlier raid, the prison had been bombed and that was the closest that we had come to being hit.

In our house lived my parents together with us two kids. Next door lived another young prison officer, his wife and 2 more kids maybe 3 years younger than us. Sometimes both husbands had to do a night shift together as was the case on that night. On those occasions, the wives and kids took it in turns to use their shelters alternately. On this night, we were all due to use the shelter next door. Mrs C. came to my mother and ‘Jessie, I’ve just seen a rat go into our shelter. Can we use your shelter if there is a raid tonight?’ And that is what we did. There was a raid that night and again it was a very heavy one, starting at about 6,30 pm.

It was about 8.30 pm and I knew that this bomb was different. The scream was very, very loud and it had a different tone. Then there was this loud crump (not a deafening bang) and the whole shelter lurched and twisted. The candles fell over and went out and we were completely bewildered. Dad had built in a 2-tier bunk for us kids, brother on the top, me underneath. The uprights had broken and Brian plus the top bunk was on top of me. My mother had been in a deck chair holding the little girl from next door in her lap and Mrs C. also in a deck chair had been holding her little boy on her lap. Both children had been thrown to the floor and my mother had been thrown upwards and was wounded in the head by one of the bolts in the roof. Mrs C. started shouting saying that she couldn’t find Barry. All this in the pitch black. What had happened was there had been a huge rush of soil blasted in through the ‘door’ and it had covered the floor, including Barry. Eventually, after scrabbling around, she found his hair and lifted him. But we were trapped in the steel box.

It seemed ages before we heard voices outside the shelter asking if anybody was alive. They found us and pushed a torch through. I could then see what an absolute mess we were in. Anyway, we all got out and to this day I will never forget how light it looked outside with a line of about six parachute flares slowly descending and dripping flame. They were over Bootle, which is probably where our bomb was intended to go. We all had to be spread around into other cramped shelters so I didn’t see that my mother was quite badly hurt. The raid continued until early morning. I don’t think I slept that night.

The next day I went out to look at what had happened to our house. Well, it had gone or rather it had been destroyed. Bombs damage houses in strange ways. In this case it had effectively sliced off the first three houses and left the other three standing, with no broken windows in Number 6!. Tragically, the young family in the first house had been killed. I then went to the bomb crater and saw this pile of earth and metal that was our shelter sitting on the very edge of the crater. Inside the crater, on its slopes were pieces of the shelter from next door, twisted and bent like a matchbox. Hence the title of this piece.

My parents had families in Lincoln and its surrounding villages so it was decided that we would go there as soon as possible. We managed to get a train from Lime Street Station that evening but we were not out of the wood yet. That night it was Manchester’s turn to get clobbered. As we left the station in Manchester, it was hit and a bomb landed on the track behind us. The miserable journey to Lincoln took hours and hours but eventually we arrived at a place that would be relatively peaceful for the rest of the war and an ideal home for someone who was nutty about aeroplanes.

Going to have a rest from this for a time.

Wartime Lincoln Part 1

When we arrived in Lincoln from Liverpool, I was, in today’s jargon a bit traumatised, though it wasn’t recognised as such in those days. Didn’t seem to affect my mother or my brother. I did not go back to school for a few weeks and just sat in front of the fire for the first 2 of them, just looking into it. Mind you, that winter was intensely cold. The other way in which I was affected was whenever an air raid warning siren sounded, I would start to shake and this would continue until the all clear. This went on to the end of the war. Thankfully, there was very little raiding. We used to get the sirens but, in retrospect, I think that was because of the German night intruders hanging around the nearby bomber stations. The only bombing that I remember was a single hit and run raider that hit Lincoln Hospital, about 500 yards away, but it was over immediately and I don’t think the warning was sounded. Oh, and one more. We had a Doodlebug over us in 1944. These were being launched from Heinkel 111’s over the North Sea. That’s enough about that.

There was no sequence of events during those war years in Lincoln, so I will mention a few incidents and observations. I was aware of the air activity that went on in the County having seen the seen the Hampdens at Scampton on our last journey to Lincoln in September 1939 and in the autumn of that year the sky was always filled with them and Wellingtons, as I recall. These 2 types equipped a number of squadrons that were based around the city.

My mother had several sisters who lived in villages around Lincoln and although we had been allocated a new house in the prison quarters, it was not yet ready. So we were kindly accommodated for a week or two at a time at each of these sisters’ houses. The one I really remember well was her sister A. who had married a farmer. They occupied a large farmhouse and we went there several times even after we had our own house. I learned so much about country life on those visits - how they extracted the cream from milk, how they made butter, all the different processes involving meat when a pig was killed (offal, sausages, ham, pork pies, haslet, brawn, etc.), how not to handle a pony and trap by standing in the wrong place so that the pony could put its hoof on my foot and I could not get it off no matter how much I pushed and shoved (that was some bruise), going out into the fields late evening (like 10.30 pm) and chasing the chickens to try and get them into the chicken houses (foxes were about) when the little blighters thought it was still daytime because of British Double Summertime, trying to milk a cow that keeps hitting you in the face by swishing its dried-cowpat loaded tail and when you tie its tail to its legs, then proceeds to lean on you and crush you against the stall wall. It was all educational and good fun.

But for a young boy, one of these visits was memorable indeed. The farmhouse was large enough to also accommodate a ‘lodger’. This was no ordinary lodger as far as I was concerned. He was Flight Lieutenant C. with his young wife and baby. He was based at Scampton and was in 49 Squadron, the same squadron as Rod Learoyd, VC who had attacked the Dortmund-Ems canal. I had read about this in ‘Heroes of the Fighting RAF’ by Leonard Gribble (I’ve still got it) and when I talked to him about it and the Hampden he realised just how interested I was in aircraft. He had been wounded in the back by shrapnel and had just recovered. He was not at all happy about having to go back on ops. – who could blame him?

On Sundays, my aunt’s family and our family used to walk in a group to the church for the morning service sharp at 11 am. On this particular Sunday, I could hear an aeroplane flying around but could not see it because of the high walls and hedgerows in the lane. As we got close to the church, I saw it. A matt black Boulton-Paul Defiant night fighter. It circled the church and then made two VERY low level passes. On the last one he was well under 100 ft (illegal, even in those days), the canopy was wound back and I could see his moustache as he waved! Mind you, my eyesight was a lot better in those days than it is now. Can you imagine my excitement? Can you imagine my feelings when I next saw him at the farm and he asked me if I had liked his little show? ‘That was for you, Ralph!’ Lord knows how he managed to get hold of the Defiant (they were on station) when he was a Hampden pilot.

Lincoln, an old Roman town, is at the intersection of a number of roads. The main ones are the A15 and A46 (the most dangerous road in the UK these days?). At that time, a surprising number of airfields were strung out along or just off these two roads. Within about a 12-mile radius of Lincoln, there were no less than 16 airfields established! And we are not talking about landing strips. We are talking about major aerodromes that housed the largest and heaviest aircraft of their day, operating in ridiculously close proximity to each other. I have flown over Lincolnshire quite a few times and have seen these airfields, or their ‘remains’ and I have always been staggered to see just how close these stations were to each other. Definitely a case for tight and accurate circuits!

So, some of my memories are about when I used to cycle along these roads and stand at the side of the airfields. All of them had ‘No Waiting’ signs outside but nobody paid any attention to a scruffy kid on a bike. In all I managed to visit Scampton, Ingham, Hemswell, Swinderby, Coleby Grange, Waddington, Dunholme Lodge, Faldingworth, Skellingthorpe and Wigsley. (In my back garden I have one of Wigsley’s landing lights that was salvaged when it was returned to agricultural use after the war).

My favourite was Scampton because it was not too far away and there was always something going on. The aircraft were at dispersal, one or two of the points being close to the road, and they were often being re-armed or bombed up in readiness for the coming night’s raid. Of course, many new stations were created during the war years but you did not know this or where they were. So sometimes it was just a matter of chance, if you were riding around the countryside and you came across a new discovery. Even then you didn’t know what it was called. I once cycled a mile or two past Waddington and then saw a Beaufighter Mk 2 on the other side of a hedge. There was nobody about and I was able to get through the hedge and under the Beau. The crew access door was open and I was able to have a good look around both inside and out. I later found out that this was Coleby Grange, a night fighter base.

Now, a little point about reflectivity on some simm models. I had seen a lot of night bombers and their undersides appeared to be covered in soot, to my young eyes. Having got up to this black Beaufighter, I rubbed my hand on the paint and of course it wasn’t soot, it was dead matt black paint. Why would a night bomber (or night fighter) want to reflect any light whatsoever. So these simm paint jobs should be dead matt. Even the Just Flight Lancaster is in error here.

There were a wide variety of aircraft types among all the air traffic and I suppose, over the years, I saw at least one of each of most types that were in service (excluding naval and Coastal Command types). There was even a yellow Vickers Valencia biplane that used to trundle around on some sort of training flights in the morning sun.

We were the first to see the new Manchesters with its two different types of tail and one day a kid at school said he had seen a 4-engined Manchester. We told him to go and get his eyes tested but of course, he was right and from then on, the skies around Lincoln were dominated by Lancasters, in their hundreds. Saw virtually no enemy aircraft. A Dornier 217 nipped out of some low cloud an nipped back in again and a low level Heinkel 177 was well and truly caught in the searchlights showing its duck egg blue underside with black crosses. It just roared off into the night

Once my day was made when, cycling back up the A15 towards Lincoln on a return journey, I was held up at a barrier to enable a taxying Hampden to cross the road from a dispersal point outside Waddinton’s perimeter and was able to see it at very short range, Perspex gleaming in the sun. Still talking about Hampdens, Lincoln is built on a hill and the main road for getting up and down is Lindum Hill. Halfway up it is the Lincoln Girls High School. I used to walk down this hill on my way to school and one morning, as I passed it I could see the whole of the rear fuselage and tail of a Hampden sticking up at about 45 degrees from the roof of the school. Sadly, it had been on a training flight the night before and something had gone wrong. There were no survivors from the 4-man crew.

Incidentally, a bit further up the hill from the school was a large yard and in it was a BA Swallow with a Pobjoy radial engine, completely unprotected from the elements. The wings were folded and I think the Air Training Corps used it as an instructional airframe.

Continuing with crashes, mid-war there were two fighters that started a mock dogfight at low level over the downhill part of the city – again, highly illegal. It all went wrong and they managed to collide. Four separate crash sites were created, two for each of the airframes and two for each of the engines, which were separated by the impact. Didn’t see the incident but I did visit the sites.

A new airfield at Fiskerton had been built and it was about 4 miles from our house. If we looked directly out our bedroom window to the east we could see the air activity around it. With westerly winds, the Lancasters would take off and climb out in our direction. One summer evening there was an enormous explosion and we saw a large pall of black smoke rising over the airfield. I understand that the full bomb load of an aircraft had exploded on take off.

Shall I go on?

Ralph

Oh yes Ralph please do.....but in you own time, I don't want it to be a chore for you.

For me and I am sure many of us, it is a great read

Garry

Ralph

You have taken me back to Hotspur days when you waited for the next edition to come out every week so you could read the "continued next week"

Thanks for giving us a personal view of those days - I think many of us just missed by about ten years

Leif

Filonian wrote:Welcome Auster.

You will find the inhabitants very friendly and well informed.

Graham

Most of the time (i'm a bit rubbish with my British aviation history, i'm a Boeing age boy :tuttut: ) Welcome from my side too!

Sorry a bit late with my welcome, so....... Welcome!

I am loving your posts!