A whole new (old) world!

I undertook another research trip in recent days, this time to the Imperial War Museum at Duxford. I must admit that I’d not done my homework too well before I went, so I had no idea whether they would have anything there that was relevant to the research I’ve been doing into the Royal Flying Corps and the air battles of World War I. As far as specimens of aircraft from the period, there was very little to see, (hence no pretty pictures to look at on this post) but I did strike a rich vein of gold in the form of Mr Peter Murton, to whom I owe a great deal of thanks for his time and knowledge.

Peter very kindly gave up much of his morning to sit and fill in some of the blanks in my knowledge of the period (which to be honest are still gaping). He was full of fascinating information and was happy to point me in the right direction for sources of the sort of information that I’m going to need in order to get my dragons flying alongside the British pilots. I now have a stack of reading material that will fill my evenings for the next two years, but I’m hoping that by the end of it, all the background work will pay off with a story that will truely blend fantasy with a fascinating period of aviation history.

One of the facts that had slipped me by as I’ve been reading up on the history of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) was that despite the benefits of parachutes being well known to the military hierarchy, and to the pilots of the time, the RFC did not begin issuing the pilots with them until the latter stages of the war. For the first five years (!) the pilots were forced to fly with no means of airborne escape system.

To begin with this was due to the fact that the aircraft were simply not powerful enough to lift the extra weight of a parachute, when already laden with guns, ammunition, and the other paraphernalia of war. However, this was not the case for long.

At the beginning of the war there were merely a few hundred flimsy aircraft available, and it was almost inconceivable that aeroplanes would be used in any other role than airborne reconnaissance. Four years later the British airborne force had grown to a fleet of nearly 20 000 robust flying machines that were involved in an ever wider variety of aerial warfare. The develpment of aircraft and the engineering of flying machines during this period was little less than astounding.

I’ve strayed from my point. Apparently, even with the development of aircraft more than powerful enough to carry the extra weight of a parachute with ease, British pilots were not issued with parachutes until a near mutiny occurred at the end of 1917 / early 1918. Until this point pilots faced with a fire (which was quite a frequent occurrence when flying a machine made of wood and fabric that was being shot at) were faced with the choice of shooting themselves with their pistol, or jumping out of the aircraft to escape the flames … without a parachute! Needless to say a tragically huge number of pilots were dying unnecessarily. By 1917 the average life expectancy of a new front line pilot was three weeks! The reason the pilots were not given parachutes - the lords and masters of the time decided that pilots might choose to leave their aircraft prematurely!

It is here that I give three cheers for the Health and Safety Executive!