“Robert Smith-Barry: The man who taught the world to fly”

In view of the book references being cited I thought that forumites might be interested to note that the main text that I sent through to the BBC’s David McKenna came from the family of Errol Galbraith Knox:

“The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918
Volume VIII, ‘The Australian Flying Corps’ by FM Cutlack (Angus and Robertson, Sydney, first published 1923). Appendix No 5, pp 430-433, features an account of the system of training pilots of the Australian squadrons in England, in the first eight months of 1917, described by Errol Galbraith Knox.”

The book you want is “Pioneer Pilot: The great Smith Barry who taught the world how to fly” by F.D.Tredrey (who also authored “Pilot’s Summer”), Peter Davies Ltd, 1976.

Yes that’s the one that I read,couldn’t remember the title at the time of my post above.It really was an excellent read.

At the risk of a little thread-creep. “A Pilots Summer” by Frank Tredray, who also wrote Smith-Barry’s biography, is one of the best-ever chronicles of flying in the RAF in the 1930s….. A superb read….

The book you want is “Pioneer Pilot: The great Smith Barry who taught the world how to fly” by F.D.Tredrey (who also authored “Pilot’s Summer”), Peter Davies Ltd, 1976.

An excellent account of the CFS Course just prior to World War 2 may be found in:

Pilot’s Summer: A Central Flying School Diary by Frank Tredrey
ISBN: 1902914120 / 1-902914-12-0

A lot of it could have been written about Little Rissington in the 1960s.

exmpa

Smith Barry was an interesting character. He would probably be labelled now as OCD. His contribution to safety in aviation is almost beyond measure. I heard ages ago that the in-house magazine at NAS Pensacola is called ‘The Gosport’ in honour of the system of flying training that was developed there in 1917. Certainly, when I learned to fly the basis was the same as developed there, with Straight and level, effects of controls 1 and 2, turns etc as a structured syllabus. Of course, he also developed the Gosport Tube (that is the speaking tube and not the one that Gosport has been going down for years…).
The School of Special Flying was also interesting as it was the first to encourage pilots to explore the flight envelope and led to the basis of flight testing.

So, in essence, there are two good things to come out of Gosport. One is the flying training syllabus used by many countries around the world and the other is the A32.

It’s always good to see different aspects of aviation being covered by the BBC and others. I sent through some material to David McKenna in the autumn to assist with his research, sadly it doesn’t seem to have been used. 🙁

The material I copied him with related to 3 Squadron AFC and some early flight training guidelines they established while based at South Carlton, Lincs in 1916/17; fascinating times in the regions early days of flight training. 🙂

I read a book about him about 6 months ago,his set up did some fantastic training.I found it so interesting that I hunted down another book by one of his team of instructors called “How to fly and instruct on an Avro” by F Dudley Hobbs.Brilliant