|
|
 |
Title: Bad Landing
Description: Published by the British government’s Air Technical Services during World War I for Royal Flying Corps pilot training, this poster is part of a series intended as training aids in teaching aerial maneuvers and tactics. |
|
The Royal Flying Corps (precursor to the Royal Air Force) had been signed into being by England’s King George V in the spring of 1912, and had both land-based and naval wings. The British government wanted to have one overall organization controlling military aviation that was “purpose-built” for air operations (as opposed to one of the RFC’s ancestors, the Air Battalion of the Royal Engineers). The initial main training academy, the Central Flying School, was located in Wiltshire, in southern England. The Reserve arm of the RFC would receive training at that facility as well. In addition, what had been the Army Aircraft Factory was renamed the Royal Aircraft Factory and also brought into the RFC, with responsibilities to train mechanics, repair aircraft, and conduct design testing. The naval wing later separated, at the urging of Winston Churchill, and became the Royal Naval Air Service in June of 1914. The RFC entered combat in World War I for the first time in August of 1914, in the skies of Belgium, conducting reconnaissance missions for the Belgian military, but flying from English bases. Training clearly was a primary mission for the RFC, as well as for the other nascent European air forces. France led the world in pilot training, dominating the first military air exhibition, the Concours Militaire (Military Show) of 1911 in Reims. However, by 1918, the renamed Royal Air Force had become the world’s largest, with 20,000 airplanes total and close to 22,000 pilots trained. The poster illustrates four steps of correct landing and abort-landing technique. As the text comments, “the pilot may momentarily ‘lose his head.’ Under these circumstances, he will do well to get away again and have other try.” Performing such basic, but dangerous, operations as landing were made more difficult by the fact that early aircraft lacked almost any instruments, unless perhaps a watch and map were in the cockpit for tracking one’s flight. Airspeed and altitude, crucial factors in flight, had to be determined by a pilot’s personal skill. In the four years of the war, this situation changed rapidly, with instruments increasingly designed into cockpits and safety devices such as parachutes and seat belts in use more often (once pilots saw they would not be considered “unmanly” for using such equipment). Pilot training could be a death-defying if not instructive experience. Some pilots attested to flying elderly (relatively speaking) craft, taking solo flights after ninety minutes of instruction in the air. A pupil might actually physically lean around the instructor in order to grasp the controls as a method of learning, while the instructor flew the plane, and the rudder pedals were expected to be mastered as quickly as could be once the student was flying solo. A pilot trainee might find himself flying without a windshield, or goggles, thus having to deal with the high-speed rush of air blasting directly into and across his face, causing the eyes to tear up and make seeing difficult. The air temperature would be extremely cold (subzero), the engine roar deafening, and with a constant spray of oil spurting out of the engine exhaust valves and straight into the pilot’s face. The poster’s title, “Bad Landing,” had an especially grim significance to these early combat pilots, as the rotary engine’s torque could flip the aircraft onto its back, an experience that could be fatal during takeoff and landing. The viewer of the poster, knowing this, could see why a pilot, especially a new one, might “lose his head” on landing approach, and the seemingly calm and clear conditions and drawings of this poster do not at all convey what conditions would actually be confronting the poor trainee as he attempted to wrestle his machine to the ground safely enough to walk away. |
|
  |
|