. [To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—All those who fly and those who, though they walk, have their heads in the air, must share the concern, expressed in your issue ..of June x 1th, at the recent accidents to R.A.F. machines. But few, I think, will agree with your statement that " in peace time at any rate the first concern ot the pilot . and his machine should be .the safety of both." Quite apart from whether or not a machine can concern itself with anything, the. statement requires qualification. A sounder doctrine would be : ".Every precaution, compatible with maximum efficiency of the R.A.F., must be taken for the safety of the pilot."
Given machines of identical performance, the ability of one pilot to defeat another in aerial warfare depends almost entirely on his skill in carrying out acrobatic manoeuvres readily and accurately. These manoeuvres can never be " safe " in the popular sense of that word (though I believe that those whO carry them out do, in fact, regard them as safe). Nevertheless they must be practised and carried out daily, if the R.A.F. pilots are to remain the equals of those of other countries.
Your, note goes on to say that some of the exercises which figured in the Empire Air Day programmes by no means conformed to the doctrine you have laid doWn. You do not state to which items you refer, but in four hours spent at a fighter station that day, and after carefully reading The Times' notes on programmes at other stations, I have not been able to find any item which does not form part of the normal training which can be seen daily in the neighbourhood of R.A.F. stations. Admittedly some of the items were made more realistic for the public by the addition of such details is a Chinese junk, or a " stronghold," but these did not affect the safety of the pilots or other occupants of the machines.
I venture to suggest that the number of deaths in the R.A.F. in the course of day-to-day training is remarkably small in view of the number of hours flown, and that a cause of death which should give rise to far greater concern is the apparent lack of training in bad weather flying which R.A.F. pilots receive. Mr. Nigel Tangye drew attention to this in a letter to The Times of June zoth, in which he expressed a wish . that R.A.F. pilots might carry out local flights, when weather conditions are other than good. This suggestion will pre- . sumably not meet with your approval, but, like acrobatic manoeuvres, such flights will increase the efficiency of the pilots and consequently their safety.
It is significant that on Empire Air Day, when something like a thousand machines were at work simultaneously, five RA.F. men were killed, whilst in. the bad weather conditions of the following week-end, with nothing like the same number of machines in the air, six R.A.F. men were killed in isolated-
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