THE FLEET AIR ARM

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 96, 24 April 1941, Page 3

THE FLEET AIR ARM

lt Bombs, Fights, Torpedoes, Hunts

HE Fleet Air Arm is the direct descendant of the old Naval Air Service of 1914-18, which, by the. way, the present Prime Minister started. And it is just as much part of the Navy as the submarine or the mine-sweep-ing branch. The aircraft, in fact, is merely another shot in the naval locker. Make no mistake about its effectiveness in naval hands. It bombs, fights, torpedoes, hunts for submarines, spots for gunnery, and it has been known to take the messman ashore with his milk-

can when there was no other means of getting to the beach, wrote a naval officer recently in " London Calling." There’s a nautical flavour about the names of naval aircraft-Seafox, Swordfish, Walrus, Skua, Roc, Albacore and Fulmar. It was a Seafox from H.M.S. Ajax that thwarted the Graf Spee’s attempt to hide behind a smoke screen in the Plate battle. It was a Walrus from H.M.S. Warspite that reconnoitred ahead of the destroyers in the second Narvik battle. It was a Walrus, too, from the Australian cruiser Hobart that gave some timely assistance in the withdrawal from Somaliland. Skuas sank the Konigsberg in Bergen harbour when the Norwegian campaign was barely a day old, and afterwards Swordfish harried the coast from Trondjhem to Narvik. :Later, ‘at Dunkirk, they lent the Army a hand; and recently in the Mediterranean, they have attacked Italian warships in Italian harbours, while Fulmars were shooting down Savoias _attempting to bomb the Fleet at sea, At Home Albacores have helped the

R.A.F. to shatter those barge concentrations and invasion bases. Most of these aircraft are land machines and operate from carriers which are, in effect, aerodromes taken to sea. Aircraft-carriers are thus curiously shaped vessels; they are variously known as flat-irons and covered wagons. They have never been ‘anything else since the Admiralty converted the old Campania-a ship that had won the Blue Riband for the Cunard as long ago as 1893-and sent her to sea with the Grand Fleet in the last war as the first. naval aircraft-carrier. There is no overlapping of purpose between the Fleet Air Arm and the R.A.F. It is true that certain aerodromes on land are set aside exclusively for naval use, because naval airmen must be trained ashore before they go to sea, and ship-borne squadrons mtust have somewhere to go’ when the carrier puts into port for repairs. This training, incidentally, involves far more than just teaching somebody to fly an aircraft. Accurate navigation comes into it from the beginning, because there is a vast difference between finding an aerodrome ashore and finding a carrier at sea. There are no signposts at sea, for one thing. You can’t for example, just look over the side and set your course by the local railway or the roof of. your favourite roadhouse. Nor is the difference any less when you come to land on her deck, because, if there is anything like a sea running that deck may be rising and falling from ten to twenty feet at the very spot where you wish to land-just sufficient, that is, for you to fly straight into the hangar below or miss the deck altogether if your judgment is at fault. Unavoidably, this small, rolling, pitching platform imposes some limitations upon the type of aircraft that can be used at sea, but these limitations are more’ than offset by the advantages derived from what may be called the ubiquity of ship-borne aircraft. A carrier that is one day operating off Narvik in the Arctic Circle may within a week or two be searching the South Atlantic. trade routes or raiding the Dodecanese. The sedate old Swordfish, indeed, with its crew of three-pilot, observer, and air--gunner-impudently poking its nose into every corner of the earth where the enemy least wants to see it, had become a sort of symbol of the supremacy that is soon to be ours in every sky. Nothing seems to stop itnothing, that is, short of. a direct hit, and not necessarily even then. Some time ago a shell converted one of them, in effect, from a biplane to a monoplane without fatal results. Apart from minor damage, the instrument panel dissolved into a splintered wreck. A chunk of the joy-stick disappeared with part of the pilot’s seat, and most of the lower main ‘plane vanished completely. But what was left, still went on flying, and the pilot, when asked later on how he had kept control-he was not even wounded, by the way-merely said, " Oh, all right. She became a bit sluggishthat’s all." ; e