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.
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.
Unfortunately for me, however, his great big number 11, metal-studded right boot, travelling at close to light speed, connected with my upper jaw and nose. The sound of the impact, I have been reliably informed, was heard even in remote areas of the western Free State. The collision broke my nose in a couple of places, the consequences of which would ultimately have a 30-year impact on my health, and the root structures of my two front teeth took an almighty hammering too.
When I woke up the next morning, I studied my battered face through the discoloured narrow slits where my blue eyes had been. I decided, none too cleverly, that flying trumped everything else and reported for my turn in the cockpit with my instructor, Lieutenant Maree.
By the third day after my impact with the boot, the swelling had not subsided in the least, and in fact was far worse. I was also in excruciating agony from toothache due to my bruised front gnashers, and I was trying to self-medicate by rubbing crushed extra-strength Disprin directly onto my gums. Not being possessed of effective diagnostic skills, I didn’t realise that I had developed a large abscess deep in the roots of my recently traumatised pearly whites.
While flying, each time the microphone, which extended on a stainless-steel arm from the inner helmet, came into contact with either of my front teeth, which happens in the air far more often than you’d realise, I would experience such an intense burst of pain that the lights would momentarily dim. Cois Maree, in stock-standard instructor tradition and utterly ignorant of my injury, told me to ‘Suck it up, chappie’, and pronounced me fit to fly.
As my infection-ravaged competency, already not in the Sailor Malan class, declined further, he felt compelled to increase his use of the detachable back-seat joystick. This ‘instrument of torture’ was woven through the maze of tubing separating the front seat, where the pupe sat, from the rear, where the instructor was, and was used by the instructor to ‘prod’ a student back into line, by tapping insistently on the pupe’s helmet. However, in my case, Lieutenant Maree’s actions caused even more contact between my teeth and the microphone.
Something had to give, and it did.
Early one morning, after another agonising and sleepless night, a fellow student and good friend, the late ‘Lang Lappies’ Labuschagne, convinced me to go to a dentist and said that he would cover for me if anyone asked where I was. I know that I intended to find the resident base dentist, but when the next lucid moment arrived, I found myself outside the office of my family dentist in Pretoria, nearly 120 kilometres away.
I staggered into his consulting rooms. The receptionist immediately declared an emergency, and shortly thereafter I experienced the indescribable relief of the abscess being lanced. This action instantaneously relieved the pressure in my head, and I then felt the delight of a powerful analgesic being injected. I barely made it home to my parents’ house before collapsing onto my bed and sleeping for 18 hours straight.
As previously stated, the first major flying hurdle on the Pupe’s Course was successfully passing the 18-hour test. Once safely over this obstacle, the next stage involved pupes progressing to actually landing the aircraft.
This sounds a lot easier to do than it actually is.
All kinds of dynamic forces come into play when an aircraft gets close to the ground, and many a mishap has resulted from a momentary lapse of concentration on the part of the aircrew during that brief transition from flying like a bird to rumbling along the ground on a set of wheels like a terrestrial vehicle.
Instructors intrinsically know this, and so, at CFS, they had developed some pretty effective, though not entirely conventional, aids to help guide their students towards life-preserving success upon landing. From time to time, a fellow pupe could be seen, for days on end, carrying a set of bicycle wheels, one in each hand. The wheels accompanied the pupe 24 hours a day and nearly everyone that the pupe met would ask what had caused him to acquire these appendages. He would be required to answer that carrying bicycle wheels was the standard consequence for forgetting to extend one’s undercarriage while preparing to land the Spammy. The rarity of actual landing-related accidents at CFS was a direct result of this treatment, which worked wonders for the memory and prevented a lot of ‘wheels-up’ returns to solid ground.
Another innovative way to correct a bad habit was for an instructor to order any pupe who was battling with height judgement on landing, to sit on the roof of the toilet block with a plastic or wooden ruler in his left hand (representing the Harvard’s throttle lever), holding a broomstick (representing the joystick) in his right hand, and with his feet planted firmly on the horizontal sweeping section (representing the rudder pedals), thus simulating the primary controls used in landing the Harvard. The role of the toilet roof in this process was scientifically calculated, we were told, to be the precise height at which the Harvard ‘rounded out’, or levelled off, immediately before touching down. Some of the more vindictive instructors even had their pupes imitate the noise of the radial engine to add authenticity to the lesson…
I often wondered what comments would have ensued and what delusions of grandeur would have been dashed had any of our mothers and fathers observed one of these daily gaggles comprising the Air Force’s elite students, their precious sons, flying imaginary aircraft in close formation, spasmodically moving hands and feet, while making toddler-like noises, while sitting on the shithouse roof.
Nevertheless, all of this contributed to our overcoming the next obstacle, which was the one no pilot ever forgets – their first solo flight.
CFS had a long tradition in this regard. Once an instructor was satisfied that his pupe possessed sufficient ability to land the aircraft without killing himself, he would call on a more senior instructor to conduct a ‘solo check’, which would entail the solo check instructor’s accompanying the pupe on one, two or maybe even three circuits and landings. When satisfied with the pupe’s competency, the solo check instructor would tell the pupe to taxi the aircraft back to the pre-take-off holding point, near the threshold of one of the active runways (there could be up to five parallel runways in use at any one time). Upon reaching the holding point, the check pilot would get out of the rear seat, open the small baggage compartment near the tail, extract a bright red wind sock and tie this to the tail wheel of the aircraft. The check pilot’s final obligation was to give the pupe a thumbs-up, releasing the virgin soloist on his first unaccompanied take-off, circuit and landing, a momentous and unforgettable event in the life of any aviator, military or civilian.