William Arthur Waterton - The Quick and the Dead: The Perils of Post-War Test Flying

First published 1956 by Frederick Muller Ltd

This edition published in 2012 by
Grub Street
4 Rainham Close
London SW11 6SS

The Waterton Estate

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Waterton, William Arthur.
The quick and the dead.
1. Airplanes--Great Britain--Flight testing--History.
I. Title
629.1'3453'0941'09045-dc23

ISBN-13: 9781908117274
EPUB ISBN: 9781909808812

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Cover design and formatting by Sarah Driver
Formatted by Sarah Driver

Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
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DEDICATION

To Marjorie, who hounded me to write this book and kept my nose to the grindstone; who put up with my late sessions, kept me awake with coffee and provided the inspiration.

To Spider and Bill, who, were they here, would have appreciated and understood.

To those few who design, build, operate and fly aircraft, and put ideals, practice and common-sense above profit and self-advancement.

To the many unheard of and unhonoured pilots who have de-votedand giventheir lives to the air and the aeroplanes they loved.

To those frustrated designers, aerodynamacists, engineers and test pilots who have laboured honourably for their beliefs.

FOREWORD

I was delighted to be invited to write a foreword to this splendid book by Bill Waterton since my own experiences relate in so many ways to his, though his test flying was some years ahead of mine and, therefore, before the digital revolution which was becoming more and more pervasive during my years of flying.

Bill Waterton has written a book which encapsulates the way in which the UK aircraft industry had developed by the end of the Second World War. It had grown enormously as a result of the war with many separate firms with names which, alas, will only be remembered in the future by lovers of aviation history Avros, Hawkers, de Havilland, Supermarine, Handley Page, Vickers to name but a few. Water-ton was drawn by chance into this scene when he was asked to join Glosters and while painting his personal reminiscences he records some of the successes and failures of UK aviation in the post-war years.

His test flying career finished in 1955, just as mine was beginning at Avros, though I well remember his famous name surfacing when I was attending the test pilots school a year earlier. In fact our paths unknowingly crossed just briefly as we both took part in the 1953 Coronation Display, he demonstrating the brand new Javelin fighter while I was tucked away leading a flight of Venoms.

Like many test pilots of his era, Watertons flying hours were built up during the war, in his case as a flying instructor and then in Ferry Command. Unlike most of his fellow wartime pilots he realised that if he was to continue to fly in peacetime he needed specialized knowledge and so, trying to take advantage of jet aircraft entering the R.A.F., he volunteered to join a new unit equipping with Gloster jet fighters. In fact he was turned down for this job but in 1944 was offered what turned out in the end to be a better alternative, Fighter Commands Air Fighting Development Unit based at Wittering. It was there that he was able to fly the very latest German and Allied piston-engined fighter aircraft and it was also there that he learnt that aircraft did not always fly or perform as advertised. He made the discovery, as I did later, that firms, the media and nations did not always tell the truth about their products. By dog fighting these aircraft he learnt the true strengths and weaknesses of not only the Spitfires, Mustangs, Tempests and Mosquitos but also the captured Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs.

In 1945 the unit was transferred from the 10,000 ft grass airfield at Wittering to Tangmere with its 6,000 ft concrete runways, thus permitting the arrival of the long-awaited jet aircraft, the Gloster Meteor, together with some German jet aircraft for comparison. Clearly, Waterton must have been a very capable pilot and very effective in writing reports on the advantages and disadvantages of all these aircraft since he was selected to join the flight which was just forming to break the worlds airspeed record using the Meteor; his piloting colleagues to be were the officer commanding of the flight and later air correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, Teddy Donaldson, and a trainee test pilot, later chief test pilot of Hawkers, Neville Duke. After some hard work in 1946 Donaldson did manage to break the record with Waterton just two miles per hour slower in an inferior aircraft; they were both awarded the Air Force Cross while Duke had to wait a further seven years to break the record, this time in a Hawker Hunter.

Waterton had been trying for some years without success to get a permanent commission in the R.A.F. and so when Glosters approached him in 1946 to join their firm as a test pilot at the princely salary of 1,000 a year he accepted their offer. From that point onwards he describes in his book the challenges and difficulties of being a firms test pilot. He became chief test pilot a year later with his salary raised to 1,500 a year and, bizarrely, was then offered a permanent commission in the R.A.F. which he decided to refuse. In the next ten years he flew and supervised the development of the Meteor, from the Mk IV to the Mk VII trainer and the Mk VIII R.A.F. fighter, as well as the Javelin night fighter with its unusual delta planform and high tailplane.

As I can vouchsafe from personal experience, a test pilot has to do a lot more than just test aircraft. I recognised Watertons descriptions of selling and delivering Meteors to Belgium, Holland, the Argentine and Egypt. He also had to go out to Argentina to try to sort out why there was so much difficulty re-assembling the aircraft. Again I felt his description of flying at Farnborough S.B.A.C. air displays in the 50s was very perceptive, highlighting the first class organisation, the often competitive nature of the individual displays and the excellent supervision of the flying displays by the flying control committee headed by the local group captain supported by non-participating S.B.A.C. test pilots. thus ensuring maximum safety both for the pilots and for the public.

Because Glosters was a member of the Hawker Siddeley Group, Waterton had the opportunity to go to Canada to develop Avro Canadas brand new CF-100. The aircraft had quite a few problems, the most serious being weakness in the wing design and he had a couple of flights which might well have ended in disaster. He spent almost a year longer in Canada than planned helping to sort matters out and in the end the aircraft proved to be a first class all-weather fighter for the Royal Canadian Air Force but disappointingly was never bought by the United States Air Force despite a lot of effort.

The book is full of fascinating stories of test flights that did not go as planned and other flights that should have been routine but clearly were not. This, of course, is very understandable when one considers the lack of navigational aids at the time combined with aircraft that often had very little fuel. Furthermore, overseas flights were not coordinated as they are today with backup radar coverage. In addition Waterton, very interestingly, is prepared to admit when he made mistakes like landing without lowering the landing gear in a CF-100.