Tour of Operations
Heroes Remember
Tour of Operations
A tour of operations on Bomber Command was 30 trips, 30 trips.
A tour of operations on fighters was 250 hours.
Our flight times on our squadron would be an hour,
an hour and a half.
Once in awhile they’d strap on extra gas tanks
on the bottom of the bird and I think my longest trip in a Spit
was maybe two hours and 30 minutes.
You, once you get airborne you’d switch to the reserve tank
and when it drained you’d jettison it you see.
So that our trips were shorter but many more, 250 hours.
Matter of fact I can tell you the number in my actual log book.
Again, some of our flights would last, if we were doing
bomb line patrol and we were close to the bomb line
our flight might be 45 minutes but on the longer ones
it could be well over two hours.
Some days you would go maybe two or three days
and not fly at all, but then other days you could do
maybe two, three flights in a day.
What did you do on the days you weren’t flying?
Not a hell of a lot. We could go into the local town,
I suppose and, but basically being on a
tactical squadron not unlike the boys who were based in England
where they got to know the local people,
they could knock off and go into town and we couldn’t do that.
Now when I was flying in England of course we could.
And after my first tour, right from Italy I went back to England
to take the gunnery leader course, that’s where
operational pilots who had finished a tour on ops on
fighter aircraft would go to the gunnery leader school
and there you would train using fighter tactics,
methods of attack and things of this nature and
then you were supposed to go back to a squadron and
become what’s known as the gunnery leader instructor,
you’re supposed to teach the other guys.
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