Colin Higgs - Test Pilots of the Jet Age: Men Who Heralded a New Era in Aviation

TEST PILOTS

OF THE

JET AGE

Men Who Heralded a New Era in Aviation

COLIN HIGGS and BRUCE VIGAR

TEST PILOTS OF THE JET AGE

Men Who Heralded a New Era in Aviation

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by

Air World

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire Philadelphia

Copyright Colin Higgs and Bruce Vigar, 2021

ISBN 978 1 52674 775 4

ePUB ISBN 978 1 52674 776 1

The right of Colin Higgs and Bruce Vigar to be identified as Authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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The day 15 July 1953 dawned cloudy but dry. Sunshine was forecast for later that morning. For the thousands of Royal Air Force personnel gathered at RAF Odiham in Hampshire, this was indeed, welcome news. For weeks they had toiled ceaselessly to prepare the airfield, living in a tented city. Now, the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II was going to visit Odiham and review the Royal Air Force.

The morning went well. As well as the men and women lined up for parade, there were 300 aircraft waiting for inspection. After lunch, the Coronation Review, as it was called, reached its climax. A staggering 600 aircraft from the RAF and other Commonwealth air forces took to the skies in a carefully choreographed series of fly-pasts. More than fifty aircraft types took part, representing every branch of the RAF. Pre-war piston engine aircraft such as the Avro Anson led the fly-past. Following them came scores of jet fighters like the de Havilland Vampire and Venom, and Gloster Meteors. They were followed by the latest Supermarine Swifts from Boscombe Down. The RAFs new jet bomber, the English Electric Canberra, was there as well as prototypes of the new V-Force, the Handley Page Victor, Vickers Valiant and the iconic Avro Vulcan. These were the aircraft that brought the RAF into the Jet Age and the Coronation Review of 1953 showed the RAF at a pivotal point in its history as it made its transition into a modern jet air force.

That this change was possible was down to a small, select group of largely forgotten men who risked everything to go further, faster and higher than ever before. They were the test pilots.

Test pilots such as de Havillands John Cunningham and English Electrics Roland Beamont were already household names due to their wartime exploits. Others including Peter Twiss, Duncan Simpson and many others became familiar names because of what they achieved in the air pushing their aircraft ever further, faster and higher. As a result, flight still captured the public imagination and crowds would flock in their tens of thousands to air shows like Farnborough to watch the pilots perform rolls, loops and soaring climbs in the latest types that were often fresh off the drawing board.

But test flying was not without its risks. Ten years before the Coronation Review, Britain became the first country in the world to establish a school specifically to train test pilots within the Aeroplane & Armament Experimental Establishment at Boscombe Down in Wiltshire. Today, it is called the Empire Test Pilots School (ETPS) but its creation in 1943 as the Test Pilots Training Flight was in recognition of the fact that too many pilots were being killed testing new aircraft during the Second World War. In 1945 it moved to RAF Cranfield before a move to the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough in 1947. In 1968 it moved back to Boscombe Down, where it has remained to the present day. Its mission was to provide suitably trained pilots for testing duties in aeronautical research and development establishments within the service and the industry. Its a measure of just how dangerous test flying was that five pilots who graduated from the first course were killed in testing accidents.

Not all the test pilots featured in this book graduated from the Empire Test Pilots School. Pilots such as Eric Brown and John Cunningham had already begun their test flying before the Second World War. They, like their post-war colleagues, helped establish Britains aircraft industry stay at the forefront of aviation development as it transitioned from the piston engine era into the jet age.

And what of the aircraft? As eyes gazed skywards on that July afternoon in 1953, it was easy to see how far aircraft design had advanced. Leading the way were Gloster Meteors. The RAF had been the first Allied air force to operate jets in 1944 when they were rushed into service with No. 616 Squadron based at Manston, Kent. Prime Minister Winston Churchill was under pressure to sooth rising public alarm over the V1 flying bomb campaign that had begun in June 1944. These small cruise missiles were causing a lot of destruction as they travelled at speeds that made them difficult to shoot down both by anti-aircraft guns and fighter aircraft that simply could not accelerate quickly enough to catch them. The problem was that the piston-engine fighter had more or less reached the end of its life. Pistons could only produce a finite amount of power and the large frontal area of bigger engines coupled with straight wings meant that the aircraft were too aerodynamically inefficient to go through the air any faster. The jet engine, however, had the potential for unlimited amounts of power and as the knowledge of aerodynamics improved, aircraft were soon not only flying close to the speed of sound, they were flying past it.

The Germans had been the first to introduce jet aircraft into service in mid-1944 with the Messerschmitt Me 262. Not only was it jet powered but it also had swept wings. Although the Gloster Meteor also entered service in July 1944, it was according to those who flew the early marks no faster than the piston-engine fighters of the day. More power soon followed and the Meteor became the cornerstone of many air forces around the world as they too entered their own jet eras.

The end of the war in Europe in 1945 brought a wealth of knowledge of aerodynamics as German scientists and engineers found new positions in the west. Thus, those present on 15 July 1953 cannot have failed to notice the changing shape of aircraft from the straight-winged Meteor to a prototype of the swept-wing Hunter or even the delta wing of the mighty Vulcan prototype.