My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleygive beginners conditions in which a certain wind direction was bound to produce asevere land-water bump soon after take-off. In this position too an engine failure—which was frequent in early days—meant a descent in the river. However, these werewar conditions and everything had to be arranged in a hurry. I noticed that in lateryears the position of the aerodrome was changed.We lived in agreeable conditions in a bungalow town near the aerodrome. It waspossible to hire a cheap and individual bungalow, and my mother came to stay withme for a time. Training was pushed ahead at a speed incredible to later generations. IfI remember rightly, I had only about an hour and a half of instructional flying beforemy first solo flight. There was an advantage in having been an observer, for this gaveone the flying sense. But it cut both ways, as it was liable to make a beginner overconfident.It was better in the early days to be a little nervous and on the look-out formishaps. It was remarkable even in the case of experienced war pilots how many ofthem were killed in ordinary flying, apart from the war, through over-confidence andcarelessness. You could not take any chances with early aircraft.My training went smoothly and I took my pilot's test, which consisted of doing figuresof eight over the aerodrome, and making a few reasonably good landings. I rememberon that day I put up a particularly bad show by making some ill-judged and roughlandings. However, I was awarded my certificate, which was marked something over1200; the precious document was lost in my Irish house fire in the fifties.Until then I had been in no serious difficulty, except on one occasion on a river takeoffwhen I had forgotten to fasten my seat-belt. This was very foolish as in a badbump in these machines you could easily be thrown right out, and we werestrenuously warned never to forget to fasten ourselves in securely. Consequently,when I arrived over the river just after take-off and encountered the usual bump, Ifound myself shot from my seat and would have been thrown out if I had not beenfirmly holding the joy-stick, by which I quickly pulled myself back again. It waslucky that in the struggle the machine was not stalled. That was at least one mistakewhich I should never make again.My flying was not bad, though I was weak on the mechanical side. We were notobliged to take it seriously, as there were no difficult exams on the subject, but we hadto go through an engine and rigging course. My rather exaggerated pragmatism innever giving my energy to anything which has no practical use and does not interestme, led me to miss the opportunity to acquire some mechanical skill. My argumentwas that once in the air you could do nothing about it if anything went wrong, and onthe ground the machine was looked after by our good friends the mechanics andriggers, who had years of experience and far more knowledge than I should have timeto acquire, even if I had the aptitude, which I much doubted. Some of us were perhapsencouraged in this resistance to mechanical knowledge by the example of the mostfamous pre-war airman, Gustave Hamel, a genius at flying, who boasted his completeignorance of mechanics.At Shoreham I gave striking proof of a capacity to make mistakes soon after takingmy pilot's certificate—though as usual in our errors in life, chance played its part. Itwas a day of normal routine flying with a fairly strong, gusty wind. The direction ofthe wind was indicated not by a wind-funnel sock, but by a T, a wood and canvas56 of 424