Quote:
Originally Posted by Coquet
On the 15th of April 1943 the C.O. of RAF Eshott, one Group Captain Beisiegel is protesting to Acklington about pilots low flying over the OTUs.
Looks like low flying gives the pilots a bit of an adrenalin buzz, and if they can spook some trainees then all the better.
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The circuits for Acklington and Eshott virtually touched one another, and there were lots of Spitfires and Masters based at the latter, mostly flown by inexperienced pilots. Training them was hard enough: the last thing that the instructors needed was a load of operational pilots flying low through their airspace when nervous pupils were in the circuit.
As a former CO of 616 Sqdn transferred to a desk job just before the start of the Battle of Britain, Beisiegel might have been fond of low flying at one time (just as the bored Polish pilots flying the trainee air-gunner-carrying Bothas at Morpeth were before several lost their lives), but he also had to ensure that as many pupil pilots got through their courses alive to fill the ranks of the front-line squadrons.
There were even a few mid-air collisions (the most famous one being in April 1944 when a USAF P-47 Thunderbolt temporarily based at Milfield and engaged in making dummy attacks on a road convoy near the airfield smacked into a No.57 OTU Spitfire flown by a Norwegian trainee pilot). Both pilots died in the collision.