flight training mortality rates

[jastaflieger]

I have read in several places that more pilots were killed in accidents during training than in combat on the front lines. Does this hold true for all the airservices? Did the Germans lose more pilots during training, did the French, etc. or was it primarily the British who lost higher numbers of aircrew in training?
Can one imagine, that in March or April of 1917 to survive training only to be sent to the front in a Be2 or some such aircraft?
Did the higher mortality rates in training continue throughout the war, or as aircraft types improved, casaulties declined? And /or did training programs improve:: what were the American numbers like during training?
looking for people's thoughts on these concepts in general.
thanks,
jim

[Tazzy2]

"A great number of trainee pilots had been killed learning to fly this machine, as its tricks took some learning, although they were really simple to overcome. Its main trouble was that owing to its very small wingspan, and its purposely unstable characteristics, coupled with the gyroscopic effect of a rotating engine and propeller, it flipped into a spin very easily at low speeds. Consequently, in landing and taking off, a tremendous number of fatal accidents occurred, and a general felling of dislike for the machine was prevalent. It really had people frightened." Arthur Cobby

This is a quote from elsewhere on the site - see Aircraft section

[Chock]

Training improved considerably for the British as the war progressed, especially for those lucky enough to be put through ab-initio courses on something like an Avro 504 rather than a MF7 or some such, but early in WW1, it was indeed inferior to that of the Germans.

Some of the propensity for training accidents in the RFC was due to the fact that a good many early training aircraft the British employed had a really narrow flight envelope corner, with the maximum flying speed being quite close to the stall speed on a few of them. This situation was occasionally offset by the fact that crash speeds would be low if they did occur, but it was still a dangerous affair. Conversely, the Germans often used the Etrich-Rumpler Taube (Dove) or Fokker Spin (Spider) for training, as well as other more advanced craft (often made by Fokker), and these were eminently better suited to training than the Maurice Farman MF7 Shorthorn, which the British tended to use early in the war.

Early pilot training tended to be a better standard in Germany, as they had learned a lot from Anthony Fokker, who had a flying school in order to boost sales of his early craft prior to the war, which evolved into a flying school at Doberitz where Fokker trained German and Austrian servicemen. An example of the difference in standards can be seen in the fact that it was considered a wonderful and rare event if a pilot dared to perform a loop over Brooklands in the UK, whereas Fokker - who was an excellent pilot - did it regularly from early in his flying career, and at extremely low altitude too.

Anthony Fokker is at the controls of the aircraft in the picture below (a Fokker M.VL. On the ground you can see a Taube at the rear and a M.II in front of it. This picture was taken in May 1914, before WW1 even started, and is in stark contrast to the stable biplanes the British were flopping around the skies in, and you can guess where Immelmann got his turn from when you see this:



In contrast, when it came to instructors too, the British were inclined to make any RFC flyer who did not crash too much an instructor. That might sound far fetched, but if you read Jimmy McCudden's Flying Fury, you will see that he was made a flying instructor not long after having soloed himself. He was of course familiar with aircraft, since he'd been around them from pretty much the beginning of them being used in the army, and he had been an air gunner for quite some time before his flying training. But he was also sent to lecture trainees on single seater combat tactics before he even had them fully sussed out for himself, and in any case he was more of a lone hunter than a gifted flight leader. The advice he offered could certainly not be compared to that which Boelcke had handed out to his fledglings. Nevertheless, McCudden was put in a position where he had to go around telling others how to go about it in spite of still being not completely well-versed in it himself, and that was the case for quite a few RFC pilots.

Part of the problem is the same thing you find today to some degree too, and not always down to what a pilot knows. I have known several flight instructors, and indeed been taught by a few for various things, but there are only two of these people whom I recall were actually really suited to it from a personality point of view. They could all fly well, but some of them were absolutely crap as instructors, one of them even froze up whilst instructing me after flying us into a thunderstorm and left me to fly us out of it whilst he sat motionless, not able to speak! That is undoubtedly a rare occurrence, but it absolutely did happen to me, and it does illustrate the point. In common with all teaching, it's not always so much what you know, as being able to convey what you know that is important. Some flying instructors I've known, shout and bellow much like bad impersonation of James Robertson Justice in a movie, and whilst that is certainly authoritative, it's not what most fledgling pilots need. Beyond simple flying training, we can see why flyers such as Boelcke and Mannock were so highly regarded, as they both made strenuous efforts to ease newcomers into combat and teach them how and when to attack. Perhaps we should not be too hard on McCudden though, for he was one of Mannock's instructors, and Mannock himself claimed that what McCudden showed him saved his life.

But contrary to what is popularly imagined to be the norm in WW1 - i.e three quick solos around the airfield and off you go to the front - pilots did receive specialist training prior to being deployed (which got better as experience was gained over the years), and late in the war, training was really very comprehensive. For example, bomber pilots had to make numerous navigational flights, many at night, and they had to drop practice bombs from various altitudes. Often it was a requirement to get those bombs very close to the target indeed to pass such tests (i.e. within 40 feet of the aim point from several thousand feet of altitude, which would be not bad going even these days). Fighter pilots later in the war were trained with gun cameras, and some very skillful flight commanders with a good grasp on tactics were toured around flying schools whilst on leave from the front, to give pointers in lectures to trainees (so this was kind of catching up with what Boelcke had done some years before). These later lectures would indeed have been useful, the early efforts at this in the RFC were probably not much more well planned than someone standing up and saying 'Go over their and give Jerry a bally good thrashing, hurrah!'.

It is true that sometimes pilots would be packed off to war after very little training though; that happened after 'Bloody April', where a good many trainee RFC and RNAS pilots were signed off when not all the way through their courses, to fill in the gaps resulting from that slaughter, and being naive and patriotic, most of them happily went, unaware how shoddy such arrangements were and how bad a chance that presented them with.

Early in the war, aerodynamic knowledge was quite poor amongst most pilots too - a good many pilots did not have the first clue how to recover from a spin for example - and so it could sometimes be the case that they would be given incorrect or poor instructions. Couple this with some instructors not being that great either, and you can see where a lot of the accidents were rooted. It's a fair bet that some of the aircraft claimed as 'shot down' were probably simply stalled and spun all the way down to impact by pilots unable to recover from a spin through panic or lack of knowledge, but to be fair, that still makes it a victory caused by the actions of the enemy flyer.

This too was more of a problem for the Brits than it was for the Germans because of aircraft types. As you probably know, the fate of most warplanes is to be relegated to training roles when they become obsolete, and unfortunately for many British trainee pilots, that meant flying pusher aircraft when training, or stable recce planes which could not teach combat maneuvering. Because of the general arrangement on the pushers, this often meant a rotary engine behind the centre of lift, which is something that is likely to make the craft not as stable as might be desirable in a training aircraft for a newcomer, where an interim mix is a better solution (something the Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutter and the Avro 504 were good for), even if maneuverability is a good feature in a fighter.

This led to many students calling the Airco DH2 - which rapidly became a training craft as the war progressed - 'The Spinning Incinerator', the name arising after a few trainees had crashed and burned in them when getting into spins off a slow turn and not knowing how to recover from a spin.

continued...

[Chock]

Continued...

In case you don't know, to recover from a spin (which is when one wing stalls before the other, making the aircraft fall like a sycamore seed as one wing tries to keep flying whilst the other one drops), you stop the autorotation by applying full opposite rudder, then centralise the rudder and push the stick forward to dive the aircraft and unstall the wings, whereupon you regain flying speed and can then pull out of the dive you are in.

All of those recovery moves which you have to apply on the controls are far from intuitive, and unless you know what to do, it seems that the obvious thing to try would be to apply opposite aileron and up elevator to stop what appears to be a rolling dive. Unfortunately, that's the worst thing you could do, and actually makes the spin even more severe. Neither will pulling back on the stick alone help, which is the other thing it might seem obvious to try, as that too will not unstall the wing. It was probably many a desperate fledgling flyer that drilled himself into the ground in 1916 whilst trying these futile efforts, because many of their instructors either had not told them what to do, or simply did not know for themselves, what to do. This was a situation which famously repeated itself when inexperienced pilots flew the very torquey Sopwith Camel.

Edward Mannock was one such pilot who had that happen, he had been taught for some of his flying training by Jimmy McCudden, and McCudden had told him that you could recover the DH2 from a spin by centralising the controls and offering up a short prayer! Shortly after having been told that, Mannock did indeed get into a spin in the DH2, and followed McCudden's advice, and to his good fortune, the DH2 flicked out of the spin, whereupon Mannock just pulled out of the dive in time, very nearly crashing into a munitions factory, having cleared it by only a few feet. Whether or not Mannock chanced on kicking in some opposite rudder or shoving the stick forward is debatable, but it is true some aircraft will recover from a spin if you simply leave the controls alone (most modern training aircraft are designed to do that).

Early in his career Mannock too was guilty of some silly things with regard to choosing pilots for roles, apparently asking for one pilot for his squadron after simply seeing him make a good landing! So you can see that even those who we regard as pretty skillful had quite a bit to learn in the early days of flight.

Al

[rammjaeger]

Hi Jastaflieger,

I don´t have the time to search for the many numbers which were already quotated for very similar topics and questions in older threads. As well I wonder that nobody of the US-American researchers answered your question concerning the “American numbers”.

However, I want to address some points in a short summary of older discussions.
It is often claimed the British Empire lost 8000+ in training and 6000+ at the front but I have never seen a trustworthy source or details mentioned for this claim. Another British source did even claim 15000+ dead to all causes but this number seems to be dubious too.

I think I remember a total number of 9200/9300+ fatalities to ALL causes known until now and mentioned in British books about fatalities in aviation and I remember only 3000+ of this number were claimed to have died by the hand of hostile activities. That means the majority of fatalities of RFC/RNAS/RAF/WRAF died by accidents at home (flying and ground accidents), accidents at the front (don´t forget this big number!!), sicknesses etc etc.

In fact it looks like the number of men died in air combat or by AAA seems to be a minority in the total of lost members of British, German and probably French Air Service as well.

Your are asking for a mortality rate in training but what do you mean exactly?
Number of fatalities divided by number of trainees?
Number of fatalities divided by number of flights?
Number of fatalities divided by number of flying hours?
(For example more precise numbers for Germans and French? are often only to get for specific locations, schools or times and many numbers or statistics are lost or not “re-built” from different sources until now.)

As well the question arises:
Are you speaking about “pure” pilots?
Are you speaking about flying crew (pilots, observers, gunners, flying mechanics etc)?
Are you speaking about members of Air Services in general (incl. also ground crew)?

I doubt that improvement of (training) airplanes improved the fatality rate a lot because the most lethal accidents were results of human failures in low altitude/starting/landing or weather related.
The introduction of the British Gosport system was said to have improved mortality rate but if I recount correct total numbers of fatalities were increasing in all major services with the enormous expansion in numbers of these air services.

By the way one should not overestimate Fokkers influence concerning German training. His own reports are often self-serving and do not fit to facts. His school was only one of 13 or 14 German factory schools which were responsible especially for the basic training of German aviators. For details about German training I am advising everybody to read my 2-part article in “Cross & Cockade” issues of 2003. I know some things better meanwhile but this article (Training in the German Air Force) is still informative today.

VBR
Hannes