He'll Never Fly Home Again

DESCRIPTION: "I was flying flipping Albacores at forty flipping feet, I was flying through the flipping snow... And I made my flipping landfall on the Firth of Flipping Forth. Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die." A pilot crash landed: "He'll never fly home again"
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1979 (Hopkins-SongsFromTheFrontAndRear)
KEYWORDS: soldier death technology derivative pilot
FOUND IN: Canada
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Hopkins-SongsFromTheFrontAndRear, p. 118, "He'll Never Fly Home Again" (1 text, tune referenced)
Roud #29399
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "John Brown's Body" (tune) and references there
cf. "He AIn't Gonna Jump No More" ("Glory, glory what a hell of a way to die" chorus)
cf. "I'd Like to Find the Sergeant" ("Glory, glory what a hell of a way to die" chorus)
cf. "I Was Chasing One-Elevens" ("Glory, glory what a hell of a way to die" chorus)
cf. "There's a Fuck-up on the Flight Deck" (subject: the defects of the Fairy Albacore)
NOTES [451 words]: Crash landings were a significant problem for the British air force: British weather of course resulted in lousy visibility, and many British bases were newly built, hard to locate -- and often close to hills or buildings. Flights of eight hours or more, much of the time under enemy attack, meant pilots were often exhausted when they got home High casualty rates meant that many pilots were green, so they weren't very good at landing anyway. And the RAF started the war with a lot of frankly lousy aircraft that no competent air force would have put in the air.
Hopkins-SongsFromTheFrontAndRear says that there were versions of this for many different types of aircraft, and I believe it. But the Albacore is a particularly fit airplane to be singled out. When the war began, the standard British carrier torpedo bomber was the Fairey Swordfish, a biplane with a top speed of 138 miles per hour that was so old that even the British knew that the "stringbag" needed to be replaced (Munson, p. 68). So they came up with the Fairey Albacore. Which was, ahem, another biplane. In 1940. The Albacore was slightly faster than the Swordfish, and had a slightly longer range, and had an enclosed cockpit (more comfortable for the pilot), but otherwise, it was such a flop that the Swordfish "remained in service alongside, and eventually outlasted, the [Albacore]" (Munson, p. 62).
Brown, p. 60, reports, "In retrospect, the Albacore epitomised the ascendency of the conventionalists over the visionaries; the least adventurous approach that could possibly have been made to solving the problem of replacing the venerable and patently obsolescent Swordfish. That the authorities should have opted to perpetuate the biplane configuration at a time when the imminence of its final demise in all operational roles was surely obvious to all is difficult to comprehend today, forty years on." He adds that the defects of the Albacore were its lack of maneuverability, its unresponsive controls, and its large size that made it harder to handle and easier for enemy gunfire to hit. It was a good plane as long as there were no enemies around, but too easy a target in combat.
Munson, p. 62, adds, "Production ceased in 1943 after 803 Albacores had been built, but by the end of that year all but two squadrons had been re-equipped with Barracudas or American Avengers. One of the squadrons, however, handed on their Albacores to the R.C.A.F., by whom they were employed in the D-day landings of June 1944." Fortunately for the Canadians, there were few Axis fighters to take advantage of the Albacore's pitiful lack of speed; for this plane, at least, the conditions of British landing fields were danger enough! - RBW
BibliographyLast updated in version 5.1
File: Hopk118

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