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A RAAF Vultee Vengeance Similar to the One in Our Story. This Particular Aircraft (Photographed Near Brisbane in Late 1944) Is From the RAAF's No 4 Communications Unit at Archerfield. (Via J Burrough)
Air Safety — Press-on-itis
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Press-on-itis: An Old Affliction That Is Most Definitely Still With Us!
an old affliction that is most definately still with us!
Pressing on “in conditions in which visual reference could not be maintained” (as the old DCA of happy memory was wont to put it), has been the single factor most responsible for General Aviation fatalities since modern high performance light aircraft became generally available in Australia in the 1960s.
And despite intensive pilot safety education campaigns over these years, this cause has retained its unhappy statistical pre-eminence for loss of aircraft and lives. Midwinter, with its short days and capricious weather, is particularly a time when VFR pilots need be on their guard against the inherent dangers of being caught in cloud. This “different angle” on this long standing air safety problem, prepared for our August issue, not only offers a timely reminder of the well attested hazards of ill prepared cloud flying, but demonstrates that in some circumstances, there can be a very real danger of structural failure.
I became hooked on aeroplanes at the age of eight — and in about 1934 my father generously paid out the then considerable sum of five shillings for me to have a joyflight with barnstormer Goya Henry in his Genairco biplane at Mascot in Sydney. My hero was Smithy, and model aeroplanes became my hobby. The pilots of World War 1 fascinated me — they still do today. So it was only natural that when World War 2 came, that I should be drawn to the RAAF. On the day of my 18th birthday in 1942 I was on their doorstep with an application for aircrew — it had to bear my mother’s signature because 18 year olds were minors in those days! Elementary flying training followed in Tiger Moths at No 10 Elementary Flying Training School, Temora, NSW (on the same course as one Jim Rowlands, eventually to go on to greater things — Chief of the Air Staff, RAAF, a knighthood, and Governor of NSW!), followed by Wirraways at No 7 Service Flying Training School, Deniliquin. Then came Vultee Vengeance dive bombers with No 25 Squadron. In mid 1944 I was posted, together with my navigator, to the staff of No 7 Operational Training Unit, Tocumwal, NSW, where the RAAF’s new heavy bomber training unit was being established with B-24 Liberators. With our Vengeances, we were to form a target towing flight for training the Liberators’ air gunners — there were no less than six gunners in each Liberator crew! Our gunnery range was to be in a sparsely populated area of flat, open country between Conargo and Hay, about 50nm (93km) north west from Tocumwal, but objections by local graziers delayed our use of it. In the meantime, we were temporarily detached to RAAF East Sale in Gippsland, Victoria, at that time a Beaufort Operational Training Unit, so that our gunnery training exercises could be conducted over Bass Strait — well out of harm’s way. Life at RAAF East Sale was pretty good. We’d park our Vengeances near the control tower and relax in the sunshine, chatting up the Army girls manning the anti aircraft guns. When the Liberators, flying down from Tocumwal for their gunnery exercises, were about 10 minutes out of East Sale, they would call up the tower, and the controllers would then shout down to us to get cracking. Doing a neat scramble and a formation takeoff, we would meet the Libs over the aerodrome and escort them out to the gunnery range off the coast.
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