Becoming a navigator
Heroes Remember
Becoming a navigator
When we enlisted, I say we, but when I enlisted it was
for either pilot or observer, they were the two... elite kind
of jobs in the air force. So, and of course with my...
uncles having been in the air force, I was very, very keen on
being a pilot, so I went to ITS and started this math training
and just general school work, and we had Link Trainers there.
The Link Trainer is a box that looks like an airplane with
little stub wings on it and, you can you can control it with a
joy stick and turn it, bank and that kind of thing. And part of
the training was testing on that, on that Link Trainer.
So we all had to do that. So one of the jobs was to,
one of the things was to turn the airplane around,
the Link Trainer around and stop it on a point. I think it was a
lighthouse on the wall or something, and I’d bring it over
and I’d go past the lighthouse and then have to come back.
I think the trick was to bring it over and stop on the lighthouse
not go past it like I told you about these guys coming in and
landing on the Debert, on the Debert runway and being all over
the place. Well, that’s what I would have been like.
So, anyway, they selected me as a navigator; I’d had all this
experience in my business too, you know, bookkeeping there and I
guess I looked as though I knew something about arithmetic
and that kind of thing so, I was selected as a navigator.
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