HIGH COSTS OF JET FLYING

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27444, 2 September 1954, Page 13

HIGH COSTS OF JET FLYING

£25,000*A Pilot FLYING COURSE OF TWO YEARS (From the London Correspondent of ••The Press") ’ LONDON, August 16. The bill for training bomber pilots to fly in the jet squadron of the Boyal Air Force is mounting steadily as modem aircraft fly higher and faster. Members of Parliament and the taxpayers who foot the bill tor a modern air force learned this from an answer to a Parliamentary question in the House of Commons this week.

In 1945, wartime bomber pilots were trained to go on to flying operations at a cost of £lO,OOO a pilot. Now, nine years later, the Boyal Air Force has to spend £25,000 before its young pilots ere able to go into scfuadron service with the high-speed Canberra bombers.

• Initial training of the young pilots costs about the same as it did in wartime—£3oo a pilot. But the costs of flying training in the advanced stages has risen steeply. The bill for the first stages of flying is £B5OO a pilot, for advanced flying £B5OO, and for operational conversion training £B5OO. What is responsible for the high cost of training a modem pilot? Fay rates tor instructors, trainees, and ground staff have risen since the war but the main increase, according to Air Ministry accountants, is because of the huge capital costs, maintenance and fuel costs of modem jet aircraft. Like his wartime predecessor, the modem young pilot learns to fly in a single-engined trainer, either a Prentice or Provost instead of the wellknown Tiger Moth. He flies about 60 hours on these machines before going on to pilot Harvard trainers for another 120 hours flying. By the time he has completed his jet training on Meteor trainers, the present-day pilot has flown about 225 hours against the approximate 200 hours that the wartime pilots flew on Tiger Moths, Oxfords and Wellington bombers. £200,000 Canberras When the modem pilot transfers to his operational conversion unit to learn to fly the £200,000 Canberra bombers, the cost of his training rises steeply. In his 12 weeks course he flies about 50 hours in the jet bombers which is about the same time the wartime pilot spent on converting to the four-engined Lancaster bombers. But although high octane aviation petrol is dearer than the aviation kerosene used in modem jet aircraft, the tremendous rate of consumption makes the modern jets far more expensive to fly than the heaviest wartime bombers. The fuel' costs for a fourengined bomber during the war was less than £lOO an hour but .it now costs more than £2OO to keep a twoengined Canberra in the air for an hour.

By the time the huge capital costs of the modem machines are taken into account and added to the costs of the increased maintenance necessary to keep the jets’ intricate electrical and hydraulic machinery in flying order, the bill for training the young pilot of 1954 has more than doubled. The five to five and a half day training routine of the modern air force is also more expensive than the sevenday routine followed during the war. Although basic flying training has not changed much, pilots now have extra lectures on jet engines and their complicated electrical systems, high speed instrument flying, medical aspects of jet flying and they spend hours practising the routine of cockpit ejection drills. During the war, a pilot was told how to operate his parachute and how to jettison his cockpit drill, but now he has to spend hours training to cut valuable seconds off the time allowed for leaving an aircraft flying at near-supersonic speeds. One wartime-trained bomber pilot summed up the problem of high training costs as follows: “It only took me 10 months from the time I first got into the cockpit of a Tiger Moth to the time when I first flew a Lancaster on a raid. Now it takes a bomber pilot two years before he is qualified to join a Canberra squadron. “But I was flying a bomber that cost less than £50,000. Now a young pilot has a jet worth £200,000 or more to fly. The extra money spent on training him is money well spent it he can fly well and avoid crashing such an expensive plane.”