John Hill

My name is John Hill. I was in World War II with the Royal Air Force, although I was associated most of my time with the RCAF in Canada here. I was a flying instructor with the Canadian Air Commonwealth Training Plan, which actually trained about 50,000 pilots altogether. In the training, you'd actually go through two phases. First of all, you learned to fly on single engine planes. Next to SFTS, my job, of course, was to refine what the pupils had learned in single engine flying in their EFTS. We taught them, as I was trained, infinitely carefully, taking off and landing. The most dangerous is the take-off. The less dangerous, still bad, is the landing. You know, you're going from ground to air then air to ground. The basic take-off and landing is terribly important. We taught flying blind, you know, that is without anything but your instruments in front of you. And we used to put the pupils into very difficult situations. Sometimes as bad as a spiral dive and they didn't know what was happening, except from what they could see on their instruments and they had to come out of it, hopefully, and they always did, eventually, even with a little help. Landing was difficult. And there were two kinds of landing you taught. And one is the glide and approach landing. This is with the engine off. This is the most difficult of the two. It requires a lot of judgment and stuff. The other is called an engine-assisted landing. That is you fly the thing in, which is much easier, compared to the gliding approach. And in those days, of course, we taught the three-point landing. That is we had the two front wheels and the tail wheel all hitting the ground at once. This was the ideal - it often didn't happen. And, of course, there were times, when one was learning, you'd try and land the thing from about 6 feet up and, that was kind of dangerous and sometimes there was damage. But that three-point landing was very difficult. In those days we didn't have nose wheels, we just had tail wheels. Whereas today, you land on two wheels. It's not a three-point landing and not as difficult. Not as precise. And then you gradually ease the nose forward until the front nose wheel lands. Different entirely and, pardon me for saying so, but very much easier than what we had to do. I taught stalls and spins. A stall, of course, is when the plane starts fluttering down like a leaf. And a spin, of course, is when you can feel the Gs. It's quite dramatic. When aero planes first started flying, people would go into a spin, they'd try to pull their stick back to get out of it. You're going straight down and you're spinning. The G-force is tremendous. You had to push the stick forward to get out of it. Crazy. We were always told that, that was discovered if a person saw themselves going down to the earth as fast as they could possibly go and thought, "What the hell, I'll make it go faster." So they put their stick forward and he came out of the spin. One thing about it, a single engine plane, if you lose your engine you've had it. Whereas in twin engine, you always had one engine. I'm sure people have heard many times of the bombers that have come back from Germany on a single engine and sometimes, maybe, just two engines out of four.