Wollies never was able to intimidate our group after that.
Weeks later, Wollies caused even more hilarity with 1/77. He emerged one morning in a show of righteous indignation from behind a hangar, where he’d been hiding for God knows how long. He was determined to nab our errant group of pupes, who, in his opinion, were violating the fundamental principles of discipline by tripping each other up while marching, talking while walking and being, as a rule, generally unkempt.
What was worse, we had exacerbated his frustration by pretending that few of us could speak Afrikaans. Communicating in English was not his strong point.
As he reached us, again at speed on the same Honda Benly, he trumpeted at the top of his not inconsiderable voice, ‘You clump of c**t, where are your proud?’
As we all fell about laughing uncontrollably, the last shreds of Wollies’ potential to intimidate us evaporated like an early morning East Rand mist.
The following day, ground school started. This entailed six weeks of intensive lectures on a broad range of subjects, including crowd favourites such as the theory of aerodynamics, engines, meteorology and navigation. The standard of the lecturing and testing was high, and any exam mark below 80 per cent was deemed a failure. A mark below 85 per cent necessitated a rewrite of the relevant exam.
There were 18 subject exams at CFS Dunnottar, and another 18 exams awaited those who progressed to the second, advanced phase of the pilot training programme. Throughout the entire 20-month duration of the SAAF Pilot Wings Course, a pupe could accumulate only two failures. Failing a third exam would result in the pupe being immediately washed (expelled) from the course, never to be allowed to return.
At least once a month throughout their SAAF career, all pilots – pupes as well as those with wings – would be examined on aircraft emergency procedures and vital actions, two separate subjects, the pass mark for which was 95 per cent. Failure to achieve a pass in either of these meant you were grounded until you could achieve the desired standard.
The standard was brutally enforced and it was completely accepted by all concerned that maintenance of this level of expectation was critical to ensuring that the SAAF produced some of the best-trained military aviators in the world.
The normal attrition rate for students on an SAAF Pilot Wings Course was around 56 per cent, meaning that we could expect to lose 33 to 41 of our colleagues over the two-year course. We lost only 11, which I believe was some kind of world record.
There was a rather interesting incident during one lecture, this time on fuels, delivered by an ageing sergeant major. The sergeant major was trying to impress on us aspirant aviators the importance of the captain of an aircraft taking full responsibility for all aspects relating to the plane he was about to fly. As the sergeant major had spent the latter part of his career in charge of the CFS Dunnottar fuel depot, one could naturally expect that he would stress fuel checks by the aircraft commander as super-critical in the preflight inspection. To illustrate his point, he decided to use the example of a recent tragedy, in which a DC-4 Skymaster carrying 66 passengers and crew had crashed after take-off at Francistown, Botswana, killing all but one of those on board.
The accident inquiry had found that the crew of the Skymaster, whose four piston engines used high-octane aviation petrol (avgas), had unknowingly topped up its half-empty fuel tanks not with avgas, but rather with avtur, a jet-engine fuel made of high-quality paraffin. The substitution of avgas for avtur in the underground bunker tanks had been quite intentional on the part of the Francistown airport fuel depot manager, who’d done so in an effort to hide his illicit and cut-price sale of thousands of litres of avgas to friends, which they’d used in their motor cars. The consequence of his act of criminality was that, shortly after take-off, all four engines on the Skymaster had burst into flames and the aircraft had crashed not far from the airport.
The sergeant major said that the pilot of the Skymaster was to blame for the accident, as he had clearly not tested the fuel properly in his preflight inspection. One of our pupes, Roger ‘Mounsey’ Strike, immediately stood up and attempted to correct the sergeant major by telling him that the official board of inquiry had completely exonerated the DC-4’s crew, as it would have been impossible during their preflight check procedures, which the crew had followed to the letter, to determine the avtur contamination.
The sergeant major, however, was insistent that the skipper of the DC-4 was ultimately responsible for the accident and angrily asked Roger, ‘CO (candidate officer), what gives you the right to question my viewpoint?’
Roger replied quietly: ‘Because the captain of the Skymaster was my father.’
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.