Ever attracted to the Stirling, for her canopy standing proud of the fuselage top line. 'An ingenious way of getting a set of landing gear into the air'.
My wife's uncle died in a Sterling just after the war testing airborne radar . lost power on two engines on the same wing and crashed. He was 22, the aircraft no was BK772
Another thing I noticed in one of the stills of the pilot is that he was only a Sgt. Something which I am told was rather normal. However, we, the Americans, saw fit not only to make our pilots officers but also the navigators and the bomb aimers. This was because of the tremendous amount of training involved with these jobs and the inherent responsibility these people were expected to shoulder. Why did the British, if I may be so bold, not see fit to give their people the same sort of reward for what amounted to the same responsibility?
Randy Purtteman To look at it another way, the British did not believe that only officers were fit to fly. The US was the outlier here; some of the highest-scoring German and Japanese pilots were NCOs.
My father was a Stirling pilot and he was a Flight Sergeant. Years later he rejoined the RAF only this time as an airframe fitter working on Canberras. His rank at that time was Chief Technician and he still wore his pilot's wings. One night, in the mid sixties, he was in his local German bar having a few beers when the owner asked him if he had ever been to Germany before. My father replied, "No, but I've flown over it a few times."
@@wasp6594 That is great, reminds me of a buddy of mine talking to a jump pilot when we started skydiving. The pilot asked Ronnie if he’d ever flown before, and with his classic boyish grin, said “Yeah, three times! But I’ve never landed yet.”
It is a peculiar fact that the British were often criticised by the Americans for being terribly class conscious and snobbish, however it was the British Royal Air Force than found it natural that NCO's were just as competent to fly and navigate bombers and fighters, whereas the allegedly equality minded Americans were the ones to reserved such aircrew positions exclusively to officers! Furthermore, it was quite normal for RAF officers - some indeed even high ranking - to man the positions as air gunners and radio operators in bombers, positions the Americans however reserved exclusively for NCO's! An interesting point was made above that it was only the Americans who didn't allow NCO pilots, while the British, Germans and Japanese did - some of them being the highest scoring fighter aces in their air forces. So much for social equality in the USAAF during WW2 !
