R.A.F. FITNESS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 25 September 1940, Page 8

R.A.F. FITNESS

TWO PRINCIPAL FACTORS METAL AND MENTALITY. MAIN ASSETS FOR SUCCESS. Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, beribboned, waste-no-time chief of the Fighter Command, is now No. 1 keyman in the Royal Air Force. In the last nine days he has directed his boys—his own is among them —to get a daily (and nightly) bag of 20 Nazi warplanes in air scraps round our coasts (wrote Basil Cardew, “Daily Express” air reporter, on July 11). Dowding, 58, spare, exacting, works it out that his fighters help to shoot down 13 enemy aircraft every 24 hours, and wing a further seven. Now Dowding counts on two main assets for these successes —successes which may alter the whole tempo of the war —and they are known as the two big M's—metal and mentality. In seeking to reason why our machines stand the pace and outfight the Nazis in almost every battle, let us deal with metal first. GERMAN PLANES GET TIRED. German Air Force uses machines with a life of 50 flying hours. That is as long as they are made to last, and the Germans say it is sound economy to send them back then to the melting-pot. Actually the planes have to go back because of metal fatigue. Through using weaker materials, the Germans find their planes get “tired” far sooner than the British.

It is quick, though, this melting-pot process. In remarkably short time their planes are stripped off the engines, dismantled and thrown into the melting cauldron to be shaped again for another day. The weakness is that an air force built on these principles is always half in the melting-pot, compared with a third of an air force which is usually considered to be grounded for repairs or reconditioning. And another trouble is that even if an enemy warplane does not meet a British fighter or a wellsighted anti-aircraft gun, it cannot be used for more than half a dozen battering trips over Britain. This is the price the Germans pay for mass-produced, stamped-out, warplanes; made as if in a sausage factory. Now how does the fighter air chief marshal (Sir Hugh) line it up with our own metals? A British warplane is built for a fighting life of approximately 260 hours. Then it is turned over for training purposes for a further 250 hours. But it also has a three-hour ground inspection after 60 flying hours, a half-day overhaul at the end of 120 hours, and when it has been in the air for 220 hours the ground staff give it a whole-day once over, which is a thorough business. This seems to be sounder economy in the long run. Because a British warplane is a hand-made job, built with the world’s best metals, it can do this long service with 100 per cent of safety.

“FLUTTER LIKE VICTORIAN SWOONER.”

’ ' Goering’s aircraft are in no way ’ hand-made. His planes are good on ( paper. Even when the first were made s they were good. Four hundred miles an hour for the fighters and more than 300 for the bombers. Everything right; nothing to fear. But unfortunately for 1 the Nazi pilots these planes were only 1 the prototypes. They were the first show models. Now they are in mass production. Performance is nothing like the same, : nor safety. The planes coming from the sausage machine often fall or shake apart when the throttle is opened. Others flutter from wing tip to wing tip like the eyelids of a Victorian swooner. Anyway, they give the German pilots a pretty rough time, and combats become a losing hazard. Sir Hugh Dowding, who flies his own plane, ranks this M. for metal high indeed, and it has a -lot to do with the other M. —mentality of his boys who do the fighting. The boys say: “It’s half the fight to have a good plane. Makes you feel you've won before it’s begun.” BRITISH PILOT COSTS £lO,OOO. Dowding is proud of the way the R.A.F. mentally equip his crews who fly the planes. A first-class British pilot costs the country about £lO,OOO. That includes his training and pay. Sounds rather high, but the cost of training a first-class pilot is averaged out with three other boys in the learning stages. Between them they may write off two trainer aircraft; it may be more. On the same principle it costs £5,000 to produce a good air gunner, radio operator or navigator. So a bomber, costing £30,000, with two pilots and three other crew, means a capital outlay of £65,000. When the bomber costs only £20,000, as many do, the whole is valued at £55,000. Fighters are cheaper. The pilot still costs £lO,OOO. but he is alone in the cockpit, and with the price of the plane about £7,500, the total is £ 17,500. Staking all on numbers the Nazis do not attempt to train their men so carefully. Cheap machines and quicklyversed air crews please, they say. That is why the German air crews captured in the last few weeks average only 20 years of age. Compare them with the R.A.F. boys who feature in the news. Ninety per cent of them joined the service long before the war. Boys I know called from the reserve last September—good boys, too —are still waiting for an action. Painstaking, and a little slow, perhaps. but as Dowding knows so well — when his planes do go into fight his men have got those two big M’s and half the battle won. I

With them Britain needs no equality in numbers to be equal to or even superior to Marshal Goering’s air force.