![]() Grider, February 9, 1918, as edited and amended by friend and fellow pilot Elliot White Springs, in The War Birds-Diary of an Unknown Aviator, Texas A&M University Press, 1988 Fred Stillman was in one machine and got out alive but badly burned and Doug Ellis was in the other one and was burned to a cinder. They came down in a slow spin with their wings locked together and both of them in flames. We didn’t know who was in either one of them. Two Avros collided right over the airdrome at about three hundred feet. We were all out on the tarmac having our pictures taken for posterity when somebody yelled and pointed up. Together, their accounts draw a vivid picture of the risks that men of their time took to become military pilots.Ī horrible thing happened today. ![]() Like Shaw, he wrote about his training and the catastrophes he witnessed at British flight schools. ![]() Grider was a divorced cotton farmer from Arkansas with two young sons and a taste for adventure. military air service to the Royal Flying Corps. I am looking forward to it.Ībout the same time Shaw arrived in Europe, John McGavock Grider was transferred from the U.S. The first flight with an instructor piloting is called the “joy flip”-I believe they side-slip, nose spin and generally try to scare you green. Shaw was then transferred to Vendome, a small French town about 120 miles southwest of Paris, to begin flight training. “Rotten, all of them,” he complained in a letter home. The courses, he wrote his parents, were terribly boring and seemed to have little to do with flying. There, his month-long training consisted of lectures on flight theory, meteorology, navigation, wireless telegraphy, and engine mechanics. He was assigned to Squad 16-A, along with about 40 other recruits, at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich. After several months of letters and telegrams to a recruiter in Ottawa, Shaw was finally accepted, and in October 1917 he was told to go to Halifax and catch a boat bound for England. Born in Canada, he was living in Kansas City, Missouri, when he volunteered to become a cadet, figuring his year of college and classical piano training would impress recruiters looking for good breeding and social standing. Shaw considered himself the ideal candidate for the Royal Naval Air Service, even though he had likely never seen an airplane, much less flown in one. Getting awfully fed up on the flying game. Murray and Chesterton in dual flight came to earth in a spinning nose dive. Chesterton had two legs broken and MacLaren concussion of the brain. In the letters and diaries of pilots like Shaw, the process of training emerges as a raw and dangerous business.Ī terrible day. Training time was slashed from six months to three in order to double the number of pilots for the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service (they merged in 1918 to become the Royal Air Force). With hostilities at full bore, the pressure to produce airplanes and pilots for combat resulted in unreliable machines flown by men who didn’t know how to operate them. In 1917, British manufacturers rolled out nearly 14,000 aircraft-a staggering number, considering that just three years earlier, only 193 had been built in the course of a year. From a few dozen types of airplanes and a few hundred pilots around the world, it grew in a matter of years to include hundreds of types of aircraft and thousands of pilots. Aviation, after all, was only a few years old when the war broke out in 1914. In most cases, the pilot escaped with only cuts and bruises, but over the course of several months, many were seriously injured or killed.ĭuring most of World War I, pilots stood a greater chance of being killed during training or in accidents than in combat. The year before, Shaw had recorded in his journal that at the field where he received primary flight training, there were an average of three crashes a day. He was alive, and would fly again, unlike scores of fellow cadets in Britain’s Royal Air Force. Am not hurt-just messed up a bit.įrederic Barr Shaw had reason to be cheerful. After 12 hours on BE2c’s I took one up and smashed it to bits. This looks cheerful, but it is much more cheerful than it looks….
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