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Description
Mr. Wilson discusses his surprise at being selected for fighter pilot training, and goes on to describe training on the Miles Master and Hurricanes. He describes the challenge
of navigating in industrial cloud cover.
Transcription
I was of the opinion, because I was about 22 years of age by that time, and I thought you know, all these young 18, 19’s, they were the ones that were going to be fighter pilots and I was quite surprised when they picked me and sent me to a fighter pilot training center so I was sent up to Usworth in Northern England and we trained on what they called the Miles Master. It was a two seater in-line motor type of air plane. We trained on it and then also on Hurricanes. We received very few hours on account of the weather was bad. You would fly out to sea and do gun practice and coming back you would, you could look down from about 10, 15,000 feet you could look down and see the aerodrome below you but you’d get into this industrial fog and the lower you get, you got lost and you couldn’t find the aerodrome. So what we had to do was fly to Durham, which is the city of Durham, and there was a castle and a cathedral there. We saw the spire of the cathedral, we’d circle it and fly due west until we hit a very large mausoleum that we could see and then we’d go two minutes north and we’d hit our aerodrome so that was pretty fancy navigating.