The ATC . . . Air Training Corps . . . a volunteer organisation, was formed in 1941 from the old ADCC . . . Air Defence Cadet Corps.   Its' mission was to provide 13-15 year old Secondary School teenagers with training in RAF customs and drill practices, plus familiarisation with certain basic subjects required for both air and ground crews.   Typical of these was a solid grounding in Morse Code, Navigation, simple Theory of Flight and aircraft structural repair techniques.

The ATC Squadrons were primarily initiated by local municipal governments with volunteer, usually ex-RAF, officers in charge.   The first 50 units were converted over from prior ADCC groups and carried an "F" suffix on their Squadron number for "Founder" Squadron.   In my home town at the time I joined the group, #10F Squadron was already at full strength . . . a new Squadron, #1979, was formed to carry the overflow.

For the most part we attended classes at Headquarters in the old Waller St. school building, one to two nights a week after school, with maybe a couple of weekends each month being occupied by formal parades in local communities to drum up funding for new RAF fighter aircraft production . . . on at least one of the remaining weekends each month, visits would be paid to surrounding RAF Stations where we would generally get the opportunity to obtain 'Air Experience' . . . flights in Trainer, Communications and Bomber aircraft types.

My first flight under this plan came in a U.S. Lend-Lease radial-engined 'Fairchild Argus' . . . a rather cobby-looking, but comfortable, machine normally used for VIP/Courier operations.

     

This was followed by several flights in succeding months in the venerable DH Dominie . . . the RAF designation for the graceful DeHavilland Dragon Rapide . . . and the gawky looking Lysander.

Other visits were to the Bomber Command station at RAF Wing where trips could be had in good old Wimpies . . . The Vickers Wellington . . . standby stalwart of the early WW.2 bombing campaign.    The fabric-covered geodetic structure allowed considerable flexibility in flight . . . standing on the narrow catwalk leading aft from the rear spar to the rear turret, one could detect the twisting of the overall fuselage in flight. Similarly, taking a position in the mid-upper astrodome revealed the wings flapping gracefully up and down like a long-distance goose.

At almost all of the operational stations in the area there were Ansons and Oxfords available for us to fly in.    At this stage of the war the Anson, with the exception of those still used on coastal anti-submarine patrols, had been relegated to the role of a flying classroom for navigation and bomb-aiming training, or local communication flight operations.