Comments on: The bombing teacher

By: Airminded · MONIAC and the warfare state

Airminded · MONIAC and the warfare state — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 04:20:00 +0000

[...] written before about something closely related to flight simulators, a bombing teacher and the idea of simulation. With Phillips’ help, admittedly, in MONIAC, Air Trainers seems to [...]

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 10:29:11 +0000

I like the retro-modernist tang of it - very J.B. Priestley.

By: Chris Williams

Chris Williams — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 20:11:37 +0000

p. 146.

Not only that, but according to the story, the trikes still had ‘Stop me and buy one’ painted on them, which might be a gag too far. A little bit of pink and yellow paint could have given them a far more apposite slogan for the duration: ‘Stop me or buy one’.

By: Alex

Alex — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 16:52:28 +0000

Chris, that Wembley thing is ridiculously cool.

By: Chris's monkeys

Chris's monkeys — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 16:37:51 +0000

Hard to say, cos none of it is sodding referenced. Bushby was a fighter controller in the 1950s, so there’s a lot of RAF backroom tacit knowledge in there, though, and he’s good on the technical side. The question is, which bits are reliable?

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 11:32:14 +0000

LOL. Reminds me of that scene from Dark Blue World where all the Czech pilots are on their bicycles learning how to intercept Nazis.

I must confess I’m not familiar with Bushby. Any good?

By: Chris Williams

Chris Williams — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 13:56:21 +0000

I’m just reading John Bushby’s _Air Defence of Great Britain_ . As well as knocking my thesis about Ashmore’s centrality into a cocked hat (bugger) it also mentions that in the early 1940s. Ground Control Approach fighter controllers were trained in Wemby Stadium, using two ice-cream tricycles, each with a radio, and the ‘controller’ sat in the press box. The pitch did duty as a PPI. Metronomes ‘governed’ the speeds of the trikes.

I’ve read elsewhere that CAMship fighter controllers and pilots were also trained in the same way, but the location was less auspicious: a croquest lawn in a country house somewhere.

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 12:44:17 +0000

What about after WWI, though — how were artillerymen trained for indirect fire after the dust had settled? I suppose firing ranges were common enough.

I’m rather wistful for that moment that didn’t happen in the 1930s when the RAF, realising its need to combine with the RN, and the RN, realising its need to cooperate with the RAF, practised bombing German battleships and sinking them with submarines, all in the same 3 storey building

That would indeed have been very impressive, had they done that! For that matter, both ASDIC and RDF would be examples of things which could have been simulated, but probably weren’t. As far as I can tell, it wasn’t done for RDF, at least by the early war period. It may well have been misleading to use simulation, anyway, given that there wasn’t yet a thorough understanding of all the ins and outs of radio propagation and reflection.

By: Dan Todman

Dan Todman — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 16:50:20 +0000

Sorry gang, I’ve joined this party a bit late. Seems to me that we’ve distinguished between training men and testing systems - so I’d be interested to learn at what stage in training the bomb trainer was used - but we perhaps need to go a bit further. A simulation used as training might usefully be simplified for all sorts of reasons to begin with - not least because making it as complex as reality might completely demoralise the poor trainee. But perhaps (and here I bow to Chris’ expertise and that of his monkeys) when you’re testing a system, you want to find out whether it works or not, as well as improve it.
As far as British artillery goes - I think that Jonathan Bailey has written that book, but perhaps you want something _really technical_, in which case I’m definitely not your man. But my impression is that whilst systems for controlling gunnery got a lot better in WWI, there wasn’t that much time to test those systems out of the line, for the reason that gunners were in action for longer: so developments were I suspect more organic. Probably worth looking at what happens over the winter of 1917-18 however: for all that our presumption is that modern armies didn’t move into barracks after the campaigning system, that seemed to be when GHQ underwent the biggest changes in structure.
To go back to some earlier comments - I’m rather wistful for that moment that didn’t happen in the 1930s when the RAF, realising its need to combine with the RN, and the RN, realising its need to cooperate with the RAF, practised bombing German battleships and sinking them with submarines, all in the same 3 storey building (I know, I know, scale etc. Whatever - that _would_ have been a landmark to British defence planning between the wars).

By: Chris Williams

Chris Williams — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 15:46:11 +0000

yr engine driver in late C19th UK practice began as a locomotive cleaner, then a fireman, then a shunter (driver), only then was he let out on the main line, and he had an inspector with him each time he drove a route for the first time. Inspectors were senior drivers. Lots of rail crew training was done via mutual improvement classes.

Source for most of the above is Adrian Vaughan’s _Grit, Grime, and Glory_