EMPIRE AIR SCHOOL

Wairarapa Times-Age, 15 December 1939, Page 3

EMPIRE AIR SCHOOL

VAST CANADIAN ENTERPRISE. Lord Riverdale, head of the British Air Mission, in a statement to the press, said that the full control of the air training scheme, which was one of the biggest co-operative enterprises ever undertaken by the British Commonwealth of Nations, would be in the hands of the Canadian authorities and that the British Government was anxious to get it under way with all possible speed. He hoped the scheme would be inoperation within a month, with a progressive expansion of trainees as facilities were increased, until by the time the organisation reached its peak of efficiency as many as 25,000 to 30,000 pilots, observers, air-gunners and wireless operators might be turned out from Canadian aviation schools in a single year. He explained that the financial arrangements of the scheme had not yet been worked out, bnt he anticipated that, as the Government was participating in the scheme, it would pay the Canadian Government so much per man trained. It was hard to picture the magnitude of the training scheme in all its ramifications, but it would mean, the expenditure of many hundreds of millions of dollars in the establishment of training schools and in the purchase of aircraft.

Varied supplies and thousands of skilled mechanics would be required to service the aeroplanes used by the student airmen. Instructors and other trained personnel would be sent from Great Britain as the Canadian authorities required them to reinforce the local training staff, and also as a start some aircraft had been brought out, but Canadian aircraft firms would get large orders for machines.