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. "The Twats in the Ops Room" (lyrics and theme of an emergency landing in the Firth of Forth)
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 [724 words]: This is so close to "The Twats in the Ops Room" that I was sorely tempted to lump them. But "He'll Never Fly Home Again" has the "hell of a way to die" chorus, so I've very tentatively split them.
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.
Taylor, who actually flew some of these planes, on pp. 288-289 cites Terence Horsley on the subject of the Albacore: it was "a 'gentleman's Swordfish', with all the 'mod cons' -- such as enclosed cockpits with central-heating arrangements and a windscreen wiper for the pilot; a reasonable effective lavatory system for the occupants; an automatic dinghy system in case of ditching; a variable-pitch propeller; and hydraulically-operated flaps." All of which made it more comfortable, but the fundamental virtue of the Swordfish was that it never misbehaved. You could do any maneuver in it, and it would survive; it went where you aimed it; it survived immense amounts of damage. The Albacore was more comfortable, but much harder to fly. That might have been acceptable had the Albacore had any actual virtues, such as speed -- but it was still a slow biplane! And some of those fancy features didn't work: "The view for the pilot was excellent, but the cockpit was excessively hot in normal summer weather and adequate ventilation could not be obtained even with the roof open and the sliding windows down. Bu comparison, the rear cockpit was cold and draughty. In non-operational conditions the greatest danger for the pilot appeared to be related to the process of climbing aboard" (Taylor, p. 292).
As a result, it had a very short production life: The first squadrons were supplied with the planes in 1940, and it lasted just three years. Munson, p. 62, "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
Bibliography Last updated in version 7.2
File: Hopk118

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