Post by Dave Homewood on Jul 24, 2019 22:52:15 GMT 12
OUR AIR BASE AT OHAKEA
From the Evening Post, 7th of September 1940
THE Royal New Zealand Air Force Station at Ohakea, planned under the Air Force development programme of 1937 to be, with a sister station at Whenuapai, the largest in New Zealand, is growing still, and growing so fast that only the immense field, roughly a mile each way, remains on the scale of the 1937 plan.
A personnel, of staff, instructors, ground staff, and trainees, of 300 was then intended; now that figure is to be more than doubled. Even for the accommodation of 300 a sizeable township was built in permanent materials; now to meet war necessities new streets of wooden buildings have built a town where there were farm lands a couple of years ago.
More men mean more aircraft, and though the two huge concrete hangars can house the aircraft at present on the station, their number will be trebled within a few months, and to house this new aircraft strength two more hangars and a hangar workshop are being built.
No Air Force station stands complete in itself: Ohakea is one part of the New Zealand Air Force training picture, huge though it is in comparison with anything that we had before the 1937 expansion plan was given effect. Trainees move from station to station as they pass from stage to stage of training.
All pilots and observers begin at the Air Force Ground Training School at Weraroa. There they swot theory, and gain experience in the atmosphere of the Air Force and its disciplinary and administration systems, but do not fly at all. Those who are to fly are transferred to Elementary Flying Training Schools at Taieri, Otago; Harewood, Christchurch; and Bell Block, New Plymouth, and later to Whenuapai, when this station is in full swing.
On passing out on practical and theoretical examination successes, they are transferred again to Service Flying Training Schools, Intermediate and Advanced, at other stations —Wigram, Canterbury; Woodbourne, Marlborough; and Ohakea, Manawatu.
But in the Air Force there are far more men on the ground than in the air, engaged in twenty, highly-skilled trades and crafts, and for these aircraftmen there are posting and repostings as training gives increasing efficiency. Rongotai, overflowing from the aerodrome proper to the Exhibition buildings, is becoming the main training centre in mechanical work and in stores practice; Hobsonville Specalises in stores and repairs; but training and advancement proceeds at all the stations and bases. Wigram, Woodbourne, Ohakea, and Whenuapai are the big four, but they are nevertheless just parts of the whole.
THE EMPIRE AIR SCHEME.
Nor does the R.N.Z.A.F. stand complete in itself. It is part of the Empire Air Training Scheme, laid down since the outbreak of war and only now beginning to gain effect, and this partnership in the Empire programme, to expand without limit while the war continues, has necessitated amendment and re-amendment of the 1937 plans. Prior to the 1937 programme the greater number of New Zealanders joining the Air Force as flying personnel went direct to England and commenced their service training with the R.A.F., serving the period of their commissions in Britain, Egypt, the East, or wherever it might be, before returning to New Zealand as highly-qualified reservists.
The 1937 plan proposed that the direct entry system should be modified and that a proportion of Air Force officers, whether they were to serve in the expanding New Zealand Air Force or were to join the R.A.F., should go through intensive training in New Zealand, to the degree of efficiency required for service in the Regular Air Force. That Training policy dictated the first great building extension which saw Wigram and Hobsonville doubled in accommodation and hangarage; Woodbourne, Ohakea, and Whenuapai commenced, and flying training schools established at New Plymouth and Taieri.
War descended and the Empire's air training capacity was replanned for greatest speed and efficiency under a common plan. The Empire Air Training Scheme reverses the New Zealand training plan in part, and increases its scope.
MORE MEN TO BE TRAINED.
A large number of pilots will still be fully trained in New Zealand before joining the Royal Air Force. In addition, pilots will receive their initial and elementary flying training in New Zealand and observers and air-gunners their initial training only before passing on to Canada to complete their training.
The observer is a man of many parts, navigator, bomb-aimer, photographer, radio-telegraphist, whose training covers the widest field. The pilot and the observer work hand in glove, with honours and responsibilities at least resting evenly. When the change-over is made, towards the end of this year, Ohakea, which is now an intermediate and advanced training school for both observers and air-gunners, will become a service flying training school, and as such will concentrate on the training of pilots. It is to meet these new conditions that new hangars, more dormitories, lecture rooms, dining rooms, stores, and offices are being rushed up at Ohakea, to accommodate more than double the number of men or whom the permanent quarters were designed.
The immense arched concrete hangars at Ohakea and Whenuapai—two it each station, with provision on the ground plan for several more later on —were designed for the specific purpose of housing between them the 30 Wellington Vickers long-range bombers ordered for the R.N.Z.A.F. as the main striking force of the expanding Regular Air Force. They were to have been flown from England to New Zealand by New Zealand pilots and crews, who had been selected and were practically ready to commence the first delivery flights when the war began. Men and machines have helped splendidly to build R.A.F. history in raids on naval bases in Germany and in record flights and raids on enemy bases in Norway and into the heart of Germany. Of their part we will be told the detailed story later on; their flight to New Zealand is long deferred.
Each of these arched hangars covers a greater area than a full-sized Rugby field, yet for all that span and depth each would have housed not more than nine of the long-range bombers. They house many more of the smaller machines used in training—Vincents and Oxfords (the types which flew over Wellington in formation a few weeks ago), and other types used for navigation and reconnaissance work, but when the further change in plan is made in accordance with the Empire Air Training Scheme the trebled machine strength will require more hangar space. Two more are at present being built.
An impressive view of the big hangars at Ohakea
HANGARS AND WORKSHOPS.
These new hangars are big, but are dwarfed by the vastness of the concrete arches of the permanent hangars, and, being of lesser span, are built in lighter material and comparatively simple truss design, leaving the full hangar space free of pillars or obstructions. Each has a floor 125 by 255 feet, with a door opening, closed by 10 panels, 20 feet high, running back on each side on rails.
The arched hangars are built for permanency, huge and solid, not intended to be bombproof, but designed to be blast and splinter-proof in walls, door panels (each one weighs 24 tons), and sweeping roof. The smaller hangars are built with heavy wooden framing, steel roof trusses, asbestos corrugated covering, and framed sheet-iron door panels. Hangarage and workshops are combined in the permanent hangars, but the temporary hangars have a third hangar near them for overhaul and repair work and the training in maintenance of motors, planes, and controls that commences in specialised schools and continues at each base and station of the Air Force.
The field is, after more than a year's work, practically finished, though maintenance upon a mile square surface, truer than anyone's fancy front lawn, has not stopped and will not stop. There are miles of main and herringbone drainage under the grass surface and their effectiveness has been now well proved by winter rains. At most, while downpours last, the flood pools do not stop flying, and the drainage system carries all surface water off in a few hours.
A farm house and outbuildings have still to be removed from an outer area of the field, but the area is for the present ample for the types of machine flying at Ohakea.
A balloon about to be released for the measurement of the wind at various heights.
Radio communication —station to station, station to plane, plane to ground—is vital in Air Force organisation. The main radio station at Ohakea, for technical reasons, is well removed from the headquarters building, but it is, of course, in direct communication with the administration. Ohakea has its own meteorological station, part of the Dominion system. Observations of barometric pressure, temperature, cloud, wind, visibility, etc., are taken round the clock and radioed to the Meteorological Office at Wellington. Standard ground instruments, free hydrogen balloons for upper air wind observations, and flights by meteorological observers are used.
Heavily-protected and guarded bomb and munitions stores are some distance removed. Off the regular landing field is the bombing range, plastered with practice bombs from elevations from low to high, up to two miles and more. Low cloud kills bombing practice on the range for the day or the half-day, but that merely means more hours when conditions are good enough, for the courses of instruction have a crowd
ed minimum of work to be carried out.
BOMBING INDOORS.
Bombing practice goes on at the station, indoors, whatever the murk and however low the cloud outside, with the ingenious A.M.L. (Air Ministry Laboratory) bomb dropping teacher. It has everything but the expense, the bang, and the misery. The A.M.L. teacher is housed in a tower room. The ground floor is a white-painted space to serve as a screen, upon which a landscape is projected from the top of the tower. The pilot and his bomb aimer work from a platform twelve or fifteen feet above the floor screen. The "insides" of the A.M.L. are above them again. The landscape moves fast. or slow across the floor to represent air speed, elevation, and favourable or contrary wind. It runs straight, or swings this way or that as the pilot flies his imaginary plane at the direction of the bomb aimer, lying prone beside him and picking out his target over the bomb sights.
If the wind is dead ahead or dead on tail the picture landscape flows directly fore and aft; if there is a side wind it crabs underneath. At ten thousand feet or with a plane that flies at 150 miles per hour, the landscape crawls below, but with low bombing or the last word in bomber speed it slides. From 10,000 feet a bomb strikes in, say, 15 seconds, from lesser elevations in proportionately less time. The A.M.L. teacher is adjustable to give as many combinations of air speed, wind effect, elevation, and time of bomb fall as there are, but it cannot give bumps and trouble from antiaircraft crews below.
The combination of conditions —machine speed, wind (velocity and direction), and elevation —are set on the projection apparatus and the bomb-aimer adjusts his sights to the same conditions—250 m.p.h., 25-mile-an-hour wind, so many points off course—and the landscape moves across the floor screen. The plane is swung this way or that, held to it, swung again and held, until the bomber has his sights on the target he has picked out. He "releases" the bomb, and a light glows on the landscape floor. That light spot is where, for the conditions under which the practice is made, the bomb will strike. The landscape keeps on crabbing or crawling or sliding while the theoretical bomb drops through unexpectedly long seconds determined by the apparatus above, till the bomb strikes and the movement ceases. If the calculations and sighting were correct the cross roads, or whatever it is, will be plumb under the light; if the sighting was faulty the miss will be shown.
No indoor apparatus, however cleverly designed and minutely accurate in operation, can reproduce all the endlessly varying conditions of the bombing range, but the bomb dropping teacher is a most valuable introduction to actual bombing practice and a tremendous saver of bombing range time, though it gives always ideal conditions, no bumps, silence, and unhampered concentration, and visibility without one wisp of cloud.
The A.M.L. bombing trainer, with which the art of bomb-dropping is practised indoors.
COURSES OF STUDY.
Flying and bombing are backed by study, study, and more study—navigation, airmanship, signals, photography, Air Force law, discipline, and administration. Navigation, a difficult art before it left ship deck and went into the air, involves study of instruments, navigation, some meteorology, maps and charts, and, always, mathematics.
Armaments lectures and practice cover all types of guns and munitions, the theory of stoppages and dismantling of various weapons. Camera guns determine accuracy beyond argument in air practice. "Airmanship" is comprehensive in the extreme, dealing with such widely differing subjects as the rules of the air, signals, the theory of flight, the work of various officers on the station and in service flying, the object of formation flying, and reasons for air manoeuvres, the effects of high altitude upon craft and its physical effects upon the crew, medical considerations arising from service flying, the qualities of a leader, etc.
The parachute section, in addition to maintaining the parachutes, instructs in their handling. "Rigging and engines" embraces the theory of engine and flying controls, the purpose and usage of flaps, the retractable undercarriage, trimming tabs; the carburettor and supercharger; a hundred engine items come in along the list. Eight words a minute on the buzzer are required of a pupil after his signal course and six words a minute on the Aldis lamp. In advanced training instruction in the use of radio is given in the air. And those lectures, studies, and courses—and there are more besides— explain why, from the boundary of the station, so little seems to happen on days when clouds hang low and no flying is done. On those days the 300 men now at Ohakea might seem to be in bed, waiting for the sky to lift; but far from it in fact: they are building the foundation, on the ground, in workshops, lecture rooms, and special equipment and study sections, from which Air Force success begins.
Part of the cooking equipment in the kitchens of the Ohakea station.
EVENING POST, 7 SEPTEMBER 1940
From the Evening Post, 7th of September 1940
THE Royal New Zealand Air Force Station at Ohakea, planned under the Air Force development programme of 1937 to be, with a sister station at Whenuapai, the largest in New Zealand, is growing still, and growing so fast that only the immense field, roughly a mile each way, remains on the scale of the 1937 plan.
A personnel, of staff, instructors, ground staff, and trainees, of 300 was then intended; now that figure is to be more than doubled. Even for the accommodation of 300 a sizeable township was built in permanent materials; now to meet war necessities new streets of wooden buildings have built a town where there were farm lands a couple of years ago.
More men mean more aircraft, and though the two huge concrete hangars can house the aircraft at present on the station, their number will be trebled within a few months, and to house this new aircraft strength two more hangars and a hangar workshop are being built.
No Air Force station stands complete in itself: Ohakea is one part of the New Zealand Air Force training picture, huge though it is in comparison with anything that we had before the 1937 expansion plan was given effect. Trainees move from station to station as they pass from stage to stage of training.
All pilots and observers begin at the Air Force Ground Training School at Weraroa. There they swot theory, and gain experience in the atmosphere of the Air Force and its disciplinary and administration systems, but do not fly at all. Those who are to fly are transferred to Elementary Flying Training Schools at Taieri, Otago; Harewood, Christchurch; and Bell Block, New Plymouth, and later to Whenuapai, when this station is in full swing.
On passing out on practical and theoretical examination successes, they are transferred again to Service Flying Training Schools, Intermediate and Advanced, at other stations —Wigram, Canterbury; Woodbourne, Marlborough; and Ohakea, Manawatu.
But in the Air Force there are far more men on the ground than in the air, engaged in twenty, highly-skilled trades and crafts, and for these aircraftmen there are posting and repostings as training gives increasing efficiency. Rongotai, overflowing from the aerodrome proper to the Exhibition buildings, is becoming the main training centre in mechanical work and in stores practice; Hobsonville Specalises in stores and repairs; but training and advancement proceeds at all the stations and bases. Wigram, Woodbourne, Ohakea, and Whenuapai are the big four, but they are nevertheless just parts of the whole.
THE EMPIRE AIR SCHEME.
Nor does the R.N.Z.A.F. stand complete in itself. It is part of the Empire Air Training Scheme, laid down since the outbreak of war and only now beginning to gain effect, and this partnership in the Empire programme, to expand without limit while the war continues, has necessitated amendment and re-amendment of the 1937 plans. Prior to the 1937 programme the greater number of New Zealanders joining the Air Force as flying personnel went direct to England and commenced their service training with the R.A.F., serving the period of their commissions in Britain, Egypt, the East, or wherever it might be, before returning to New Zealand as highly-qualified reservists.
The 1937 plan proposed that the direct entry system should be modified and that a proportion of Air Force officers, whether they were to serve in the expanding New Zealand Air Force or were to join the R.A.F., should go through intensive training in New Zealand, to the degree of efficiency required for service in the Regular Air Force. That Training policy dictated the first great building extension which saw Wigram and Hobsonville doubled in accommodation and hangarage; Woodbourne, Ohakea, and Whenuapai commenced, and flying training schools established at New Plymouth and Taieri.
War descended and the Empire's air training capacity was replanned for greatest speed and efficiency under a common plan. The Empire Air Training Scheme reverses the New Zealand training plan in part, and increases its scope.
MORE MEN TO BE TRAINED.
A large number of pilots will still be fully trained in New Zealand before joining the Royal Air Force. In addition, pilots will receive their initial and elementary flying training in New Zealand and observers and air-gunners their initial training only before passing on to Canada to complete their training.
The observer is a man of many parts, navigator, bomb-aimer, photographer, radio-telegraphist, whose training covers the widest field. The pilot and the observer work hand in glove, with honours and responsibilities at least resting evenly. When the change-over is made, towards the end of this year, Ohakea, which is now an intermediate and advanced training school for both observers and air-gunners, will become a service flying training school, and as such will concentrate on the training of pilots. It is to meet these new conditions that new hangars, more dormitories, lecture rooms, dining rooms, stores, and offices are being rushed up at Ohakea, to accommodate more than double the number of men or whom the permanent quarters were designed.
The immense arched concrete hangars at Ohakea and Whenuapai—two it each station, with provision on the ground plan for several more later on —were designed for the specific purpose of housing between them the 30 Wellington Vickers long-range bombers ordered for the R.N.Z.A.F. as the main striking force of the expanding Regular Air Force. They were to have been flown from England to New Zealand by New Zealand pilots and crews, who had been selected and were practically ready to commence the first delivery flights when the war began. Men and machines have helped splendidly to build R.A.F. history in raids on naval bases in Germany and in record flights and raids on enemy bases in Norway and into the heart of Germany. Of their part we will be told the detailed story later on; their flight to New Zealand is long deferred.
Each of these arched hangars covers a greater area than a full-sized Rugby field, yet for all that span and depth each would have housed not more than nine of the long-range bombers. They house many more of the smaller machines used in training—Vincents and Oxfords (the types which flew over Wellington in formation a few weeks ago), and other types used for navigation and reconnaissance work, but when the further change in plan is made in accordance with the Empire Air Training Scheme the trebled machine strength will require more hangar space. Two more are at present being built.
An impressive view of the big hangars at Ohakea
HANGARS AND WORKSHOPS.
These new hangars are big, but are dwarfed by the vastness of the concrete arches of the permanent hangars, and, being of lesser span, are built in lighter material and comparatively simple truss design, leaving the full hangar space free of pillars or obstructions. Each has a floor 125 by 255 feet, with a door opening, closed by 10 panels, 20 feet high, running back on each side on rails.
The arched hangars are built for permanency, huge and solid, not intended to be bombproof, but designed to be blast and splinter-proof in walls, door panels (each one weighs 24 tons), and sweeping roof. The smaller hangars are built with heavy wooden framing, steel roof trusses, asbestos corrugated covering, and framed sheet-iron door panels. Hangarage and workshops are combined in the permanent hangars, but the temporary hangars have a third hangar near them for overhaul and repair work and the training in maintenance of motors, planes, and controls that commences in specialised schools and continues at each base and station of the Air Force.
The field is, after more than a year's work, practically finished, though maintenance upon a mile square surface, truer than anyone's fancy front lawn, has not stopped and will not stop. There are miles of main and herringbone drainage under the grass surface and their effectiveness has been now well proved by winter rains. At most, while downpours last, the flood pools do not stop flying, and the drainage system carries all surface water off in a few hours.
A farm house and outbuildings have still to be removed from an outer area of the field, but the area is for the present ample for the types of machine flying at Ohakea.
A balloon about to be released for the measurement of the wind at various heights.
Radio communication —station to station, station to plane, plane to ground—is vital in Air Force organisation. The main radio station at Ohakea, for technical reasons, is well removed from the headquarters building, but it is, of course, in direct communication with the administration. Ohakea has its own meteorological station, part of the Dominion system. Observations of barometric pressure, temperature, cloud, wind, visibility, etc., are taken round the clock and radioed to the Meteorological Office at Wellington. Standard ground instruments, free hydrogen balloons for upper air wind observations, and flights by meteorological observers are used.
Heavily-protected and guarded bomb and munitions stores are some distance removed. Off the regular landing field is the bombing range, plastered with practice bombs from elevations from low to high, up to two miles and more. Low cloud kills bombing practice on the range for the day or the half-day, but that merely means more hours when conditions are good enough, for the courses of instruction have a crowd
ed minimum of work to be carried out.
BOMBING INDOORS.
Bombing practice goes on at the station, indoors, whatever the murk and however low the cloud outside, with the ingenious A.M.L. (Air Ministry Laboratory) bomb dropping teacher. It has everything but the expense, the bang, and the misery. The A.M.L. teacher is housed in a tower room. The ground floor is a white-painted space to serve as a screen, upon which a landscape is projected from the top of the tower. The pilot and his bomb aimer work from a platform twelve or fifteen feet above the floor screen. The "insides" of the A.M.L. are above them again. The landscape moves fast. or slow across the floor to represent air speed, elevation, and favourable or contrary wind. It runs straight, or swings this way or that as the pilot flies his imaginary plane at the direction of the bomb aimer, lying prone beside him and picking out his target over the bomb sights.
If the wind is dead ahead or dead on tail the picture landscape flows directly fore and aft; if there is a side wind it crabs underneath. At ten thousand feet or with a plane that flies at 150 miles per hour, the landscape crawls below, but with low bombing or the last word in bomber speed it slides. From 10,000 feet a bomb strikes in, say, 15 seconds, from lesser elevations in proportionately less time. The A.M.L. teacher is adjustable to give as many combinations of air speed, wind effect, elevation, and time of bomb fall as there are, but it cannot give bumps and trouble from antiaircraft crews below.
The combination of conditions —machine speed, wind (velocity and direction), and elevation —are set on the projection apparatus and the bomb-aimer adjusts his sights to the same conditions—250 m.p.h., 25-mile-an-hour wind, so many points off course—and the landscape moves across the floor screen. The plane is swung this way or that, held to it, swung again and held, until the bomber has his sights on the target he has picked out. He "releases" the bomb, and a light glows on the landscape floor. That light spot is where, for the conditions under which the practice is made, the bomb will strike. The landscape keeps on crabbing or crawling or sliding while the theoretical bomb drops through unexpectedly long seconds determined by the apparatus above, till the bomb strikes and the movement ceases. If the calculations and sighting were correct the cross roads, or whatever it is, will be plumb under the light; if the sighting was faulty the miss will be shown.
No indoor apparatus, however cleverly designed and minutely accurate in operation, can reproduce all the endlessly varying conditions of the bombing range, but the bomb dropping teacher is a most valuable introduction to actual bombing practice and a tremendous saver of bombing range time, though it gives always ideal conditions, no bumps, silence, and unhampered concentration, and visibility without one wisp of cloud.
The A.M.L. bombing trainer, with which the art of bomb-dropping is practised indoors.
COURSES OF STUDY.
Flying and bombing are backed by study, study, and more study—navigation, airmanship, signals, photography, Air Force law, discipline, and administration. Navigation, a difficult art before it left ship deck and went into the air, involves study of instruments, navigation, some meteorology, maps and charts, and, always, mathematics.
Armaments lectures and practice cover all types of guns and munitions, the theory of stoppages and dismantling of various weapons. Camera guns determine accuracy beyond argument in air practice. "Airmanship" is comprehensive in the extreme, dealing with such widely differing subjects as the rules of the air, signals, the theory of flight, the work of various officers on the station and in service flying, the object of formation flying, and reasons for air manoeuvres, the effects of high altitude upon craft and its physical effects upon the crew, medical considerations arising from service flying, the qualities of a leader, etc.
The parachute section, in addition to maintaining the parachutes, instructs in their handling. "Rigging and engines" embraces the theory of engine and flying controls, the purpose and usage of flaps, the retractable undercarriage, trimming tabs; the carburettor and supercharger; a hundred engine items come in along the list. Eight words a minute on the buzzer are required of a pupil after his signal course and six words a minute on the Aldis lamp. In advanced training instruction in the use of radio is given in the air. And those lectures, studies, and courses—and there are more besides— explain why, from the boundary of the station, so little seems to happen on days when clouds hang low and no flying is done. On those days the 300 men now at Ohakea might seem to be in bed, waiting for the sky to lift; but far from it in fact: they are building the foundation, on the ground, in workshops, lecture rooms, and special equipment and study sections, from which Air Force success begins.
Part of the cooking equipment in the kitchens of the Ohakea station.
EVENING POST, 7 SEPTEMBER 1940
