Engine Flight, RAE in Wartime

Extract

These recollections start a long time after those in the memorable Centenary issue of the JOURNAL, but will add a page in the history of the RAE which I joined in 1939—and found myself in the Engine Research Flight.

Life there was very peaceful before the War and aeroplanes were new and exciting. Looking back now, some of the work done there was very primitive with none of the elaborate test and recording equipment available today. I recall flying for hours in a Harrow, looking for icing conditions to test an automatic carburettor de-icing system; endurance flights on new plug types, high octane fuel and tests of an early Merlin in a very odd aeroplane where the observer sat in a box under the pilot's seat. The pilots then in C Flight are now almost legendary figures—“Spinner” White, killed in the prototype Spitfire K 5054, Rex Hayter, “Tiger” Hawkins, Roly Falk, “Bruin” Purvis, Hubert Broad, Clouston and H. J. Wilson, to name but a few.