ATA CHALLENGES: NAVIGATION AND WEATHER

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 Of all the difficulties the ATA faced in doing their job of delivering between 400 and 1,400 aircraft every day, navigating without radios or instruments -- particularly in bad weather -- was undoubtedly the greatest. Essentially, all standard methods of navigation available in this period were not available to the pilots of the ATA. It was back to flying as it had been in its infancy -- but with fast and heavy aircraft that could not be put down in a cow pasture. Not to mention that British weather was notoriously bad....


The difficulties encountered were neatly summarised by one of the ATA's women pilots Rosemary de Cros. She noted: 

At the beginning of the War a lot of American men came over to join the ATA. They were very welcome and useful -- once they realised this is a small island and one had to be careful to stay on it, and not get over occupied Europe by mistake, and when they learnt that there was no question of 'flying North until you hit a railroad', because the whole place is a criss-cross of railways in every direction. [Rosemary Du Cros, ATA Girl: Memoirs of a Wartime Ferry Pilot, Frederick Muller Ltd., 1983, p 74]

 Dead reckoning was further complicated by the fact that due to barrage balloons, anti-aircraft and artillery schools, coastal defences it was virtually never possible to fly by a direct route any where. In the densely populated parts of the country it was also easy to get confused by the sheer number of roads, railway, factories etc. that all looked very similar from a few thousand feet up. Nor should it be forgotten that Britain burned coal for both domestic and industrial purposes, meaning that industrial regions particularly were often lost under a cloud of smog which obscured visual references. 

To make matters worse, the maps on which the ATA had to rely were generally incomplete and outdated. At least they were helpfully notated with the disclaimer: "Areas dangerous to flying are not marked on this sheet." Another hazard arose from the fact that the ATA was often flying in aircraft to newly formed squadrons on airfields still under construction -- or to airfields that had recently been visited by the Luftwaffe. 

Yet it was undoubtedly the English weather that presented the greatest hazard to ATA pilots. In this era, long range weather forecasting was handicapped by the fact that routine weather reports from maritime traffic in the Atlantic, a major source of meteorological data in peacetime, were no longer available; due to the U-boat threat, ships could not risk broadcasting their position for any reason. Furthermore, without radios, ATA pilots could never obtain up-dated weather advisories while underway. Weather was the primary cause of death among ATA pilots.

During a particularly dismal period of the war, namely in the autumn of 1942, the ATA flew in very bad weather in an effort to deliver vitally needed aircraft, particularly Spitfires bound for Malta via aircraft carrier. On 15 September no fewer than six pilots were killed, including two flying those urgently needed Spitfires. On another occasion, Diana Barnato Walker found herself caught out abruptly in cloud and barely managed to land at an airfield not featured on her map. She learned later, when she reported to her CO, the she had encountered a so-called "weather inversion": due to a slight drop in temperature on a day of high humidity, the whole of Middle England had suddenly become blanketed in fog. Walker reports:

Every pilot of the Training Pool had been caught out by the weather, and had had to put down somewhere. Several aircraft had been broken,and two of us had been killed. [Diana Barnato Walker, Speading My Wings,   Grub Street, 2003, p.77]

 Anthony Phelps remembers another bad day:

One of the two Hurricanes [in the hands of ATA pilots] which passed me over the tops of the cloud could spun in from my thousands of feet with several inches of ice on its wings. ...altogether int hat area the freak weather conditions cause seven aeroplanes to crash, killing twelve pilots...[Anthony Phelps, I Couldn't Care Less, Harborough Publishing Co Ltd, 1945, p 91]

The problem was particularly acute in winter, when the weather could be so bad for so long that aircraft in need of transport accumulated in ever greater numbers. The RAF had a tendency to get impatient in these circumstances. This lead to the (possibly apocryphal) following exchange: Air Chief Marshal Harris called the Managing Director of the ATA, Gerard d'Erlanger, personally. He, in his infamous blunt and gruff manner, complained bitterly about the "failure" of the ATA to deliver the aircraft his squadrons needed. D'Erlanger allegedly responded by asking how many sorties Bomber Command had flown in the previous week. Harris indignantly retorted that it was quite impossible to fly sorties in the weather they had been having -- and then stopped when he realised what he'd said. The exchange is said to have ended amicably. 

 The tendency of the experienced pilots, however, was to try to fly even if the weather was doubtful. Pilots would often take off and 'have a look-see.' ATA guidelines were that there had to be a ceiling of 800ft and at least 2,000 ft of visibility, but most pilots flew whenever they felt -- subjectively -- that they could make it. This meant that even if several pilots from the same Pool were heading in similar directions with identical or similar aircraft, in questionable weather some might take off and carry on and others might elect to remain on the ground. Nevertheless, the Pool Commanders tried to discourage foolhardy flying since it was in direct conflict with the ATA mission of delivering aircraft safely and in perfect condition to the RAF or FAA. Phelps notes:

...pilots used to shoot a line about the weather they had been flying through. I put a stop to that. If the weather was so bad that it was worth talking about after landing, then [no one] should have been flying without a radio. In this game...a good pilot gets himself out of trouble, but a better one doesn't get into it. [Phelps, 55]

Given the ATA's outstanding record for safety, it would appear that despite the 'line-shooting' about flying in bad weather that one finds in the memoirs of ATA pilots, ultimately discretion did win out of foolhardiness most of the time.

A former ATA woman pilot is one of the leading female protagonists in the Bridge to Tomorrow Trilogy about the Berlin Airlift.  Find out more about the series at: https://helenapschrader.net/bridge-to-tomorrow/

Watch a video teaser here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7rS_Mwy3TU 

                                      

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