Lord Swinton, Secretary of State for Air, has repudiated suggestions that pilots were not trained in blind flying as they were formerly, and that unnecessary risks were taken in their training.
Speaking at a luncheon of Sheffield Chamber of Commerce, he said men used to have to wait in a squadron think tuis may Be rom outside where eyes seem to be mar
the gas was coming off the clothes the men who had been in here just is still very hard to fact, to you as I draw a just stopped then; you probably "heard it....I'm not Suffering any discomfort except a sort of pricking feeling round the bottom of my neck. I believe that's where for some time before they learned blind flying, but now it was part of their training. The suggestion of "unnecessary risks in training" was not fair.
Some risk there must be, for a man in the Air Force was always on active service. and spectacular exercises were part of the ordinary necessary training of every pilot to give him the mastery of his craft. There was no question of pressing men on ahead of what they were, and ready to do.
There would always be accidents in the air, but it should be remembered thai there was an enormous increase to-day in the number of hours flown compared with what there were in the small Air Force of a few years ago. The public could content and confident that the greatest care was taken, and would be taken. in training. He did not want uninformed criticism to deter older men and women from encouraging or letting their boys enter a great, happy service.
Mentioning that the Air Force had
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