Mosquito Intruder Pilot by Jeremy Walsh

Author:Jeremy Walsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Aviation & Nautical
Publisher: Air World
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Yet again, Ben didn’t make any representations to his Flight Commander, Squadron Leader Freddie Snell, about commissioning, even though the squadron CO was obviously supportive, having benefited from the process himself.

In August Ben returned to flying the Mosquito by completing some fairly intensive training. After a twenty-five-minute dual check with Squadron Leader Snell on a TIII, on both 11 and 12 August Ben checked out the local area around Kolar and completed some circuit training. On 16 August, with a passenger onboard, Ben completed a quick air test and then practised formation flying.

During the last week of the month, Ben and Ossie went to the ranges three times to practice low-level bombing, which could be extremely hazardous and required real precision. Flying at 100ft or less made accurate identification of the target tricky and gave only a small margin for the aircraft to escape the blast of its own bomb. Bombing impressed Ben, ‘They make a nice hole!’ With little previous experience of using bombs, he relished the opportunity to develop his skills. He learnt about fusing (arming), selecting, and releasing bombs, as well as the various bombing techniques using the FB VI’s compromise of a combined gun and bomb sight. Although Ben loved the Mosquito, he was never a fan of its rudimentary bomb sight, really not much more than a gun sight suitable for aiming the cannons and machine guns. Also, as the observer couldn’t see through the sight, the pilot had total responsibility for flying the aircraft, aiming the bomb and releasing it. Other pilots had reservations, as well, ‘The gun-sight was adequate and simple enough to avoid attention being diverted unnecessarily from flying the aircraft. With experience, bombs and RP could be aimed very accurately at low-level merely by looking straight ahead through the flat windscreen and releasing when the relative positions looked right! This required a little practice but the indivisible bond between pilot and aircraft allowed the skill to be acquired naturally – and for most, quite quickly.’153

For a bomb sight to be reasonably accurate, it needs to be able to compensate for some, if not all of, the variables which can affect the flight of the bomb once it has left the delivering aircraft. Other than rockets, all weapons, once fired, suffer to some degree from a limitation often called ‘velocity drop’. As the projectile, whether bomb or bullet, slows down, the effect of gravity on its flight path becomes more and more pronounced, until, ultimately, it will be falling vertically. So it will have a curved flightpath with the downward angle getting increasingly steep. But the bomb aimers view through his sight is a straight line to the target. A bomb sight should at least allow for the aiming mark to be ‘depressed’ or lowered, to compensate for this effect. A gun sight is normally aligned to the longitudinal axis of the aircraft’s flightpath at attack speed. So to use this gun sight to drop a bomb from level flight the pilot has to fly very accurately and watch for his aiming point to appear in the bottom of the sight.

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