After four more flights came the successful tests for the “Ticket” which transforms the pupil into a certificated aviator. This preliminary triumph was celebrated the same evening by a joy-ride at nearly 2,000 feet, the highest altitude that “Theta” had reached on a solo performance. Nearly four years and a half had elapsed between the schoolboy “Ticket” and the real thing.
Then came a transfer to another and more advanced type of machine. On this there were but three flights with an instructor, and then another “solo” performance. Towards the close of the year “Theta” left Aerodrome “A” for Aerodrome “B,” having in the meantime been gazetted as a probationary second lieutenant, Special Reserve.
The advanced course occupied about three months. It proved more exciting in many ways. In the elementary portion of training “Theta” saw many “crashes,” none of which, however, proved fatal. In the second, war conditions more nearly prevailed, and at times—when, for example, three colleagues lost their lives in flying, and a Canadian friend who shared his hut in training was reported “missing, believed killed,” within a few weeks of reaching the front—the stern realities of his new profession were driven home.
But youth is ever cheerful and optimistic. In fulness of time there came a flight of a covey of seven “probationaries” in one taxicab to an examination centre for “wings,” a successful ending, followed shortly afterwards by final leave, an early-morning gathering of newly made flying officers at Charing Cross Station, the leave-taking, and the departure to the front.
Training was over; the testing-time had come. Before his nineteenth birthday was reached “Theta” had been across the German lines.
His letters may now be allowed to “carry on.”
BOOK I
IN TRAINING
(October-April)
I
FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE
Early Impressions.