Imperial Airdays are here again

[Ralf Roggeveen]

The old Imperial cutaway-type pictures have proved popular here, so this is the one for the Atalanta:

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Promised to get to Delhi in something interesting, so now it's time to go in this:

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It is, of course, the Avro Ten, British licence-built Fokker F-VII 3m.

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Imperial did have two of them: G-ABLU Apollo (which crashed in Belgium in 1938) and this one, G-AASP Achilles.

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Achilles was chartered to BOAC at its inception, but destroyed by enemy action in 1940 (on the ground in England I seem to remember).

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You may have noticed that the weather has taken a turn for the worse...

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Thought it might be interesting to try to fly in Monsoon conditions...

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Famous last words. I just made it, but there was at least one very hairy moment, as you shall see.

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Useful dials there outside on the engines that they refer to. Some large aircraft of a slightly earlier period (including airships) actually had an engineer sitting with them throughout the flight, so this is a technological advance.

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Here's a chap going to work in WW1:

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Join the Airforce, see the world. Try not to fall off and hit it.

Anyway, at first the Monsoon weather seemed OK, just a bit drizzly really and you could easily climb above it.

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Then it got very nasty indeed...

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There was a frightful thunderstorm.

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I tried to get a picture of the poor old Avro/Fokker being lit up by lightning (there was plenty of that), but was too busy grappling with the controls! Of course it's normally very stable with that huge cantilever wing, but the same friendly wing that holds you up can easily be shoved down by unforeseen pressure from above!

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Fortunately we had reached 9000 feet (the height chosen by Low Altitude Airways) when the worst weather struck, so there was room to recover.

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But it was knocked about quite badly and we lost 3000 feet in seconds, so I had to climb back up. Luckily the storm seemed to disappear as fast as it had arisen.

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Spotted Willy's HP-42 trundling sedately along - he must have missed what I just went through.

Most of the time - about an hour and a half between Jaipur and Delhi - we were above the cloud and you could even see breaks in it and make out the fields below.

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An Indian colleague at work tells me that the Monsoon is really in July/August, but it seemed worth trying to fly a '30s aircraft in more difficult conditions. I doubt if they would have risked it in one of these, though the immortal Amelia did take her Electra through similar storms (the rainfall was so strong that it stripped paint off her wings - !).

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Despite the dodgy weather, saw (and heard) quite a lot of traffic as we got closer to Delhi.

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Nice Piper Cub - first made by Taylor from 1930, but they became Piper Aircraft Corp. in '37.

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Still in rain most of the time, but the storm died down and there were breaks in the cloud with sun shining through.

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It's flat and fertile Rajahstan between Jaipur and Delhi, the mountains are to the north.

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Delhi had been the Moghul capital of India, though the British ruled from Calcutta until New Delhi (still capital of the Republic of India of course) was specially built in the early 20th Century. The Moghuls had set a useful imperialist precedent, also being foreign (originally Persian) and having a different religion (Islam) from the majority Hindu population.

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(Hope I'll be able to spot the airport)...

Unbelievably most of India was conquered by the private East India Company between the mid-18th and mid-19th Centuries, though the British Government did appoint a Governor General. The HEIC (Honourable East India Co.) was so powerful that it had its own army (mostly high caste Bengali soldiers with white officers, a few all-white units) and navy and was able to sub-contract units of the British state army to come over and help them conquer the place. The huge subcontinent was politically divided into Presidencies: Bombay (west), Madras (south) and Bengal (north).

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By 1857 the Indians in the north had had enough and the famous Indian Mutiny took place. This is sometimes called 'the First Indian Rebellion' or 'War of Resistance', but it definitely was a mutiny of the (mainly Hindu) HEIC army in shaky alliance with the last vestiges of (Muslim) Moghul power and some Hindu rulers. Other 'native troops', notably Sikhs and Gurkhas, were quite happy to help the British put down the rebels!

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Some British women and children were killed, leading to savage reprisals. Interestingly, Muslim rebels were executed by being tied to gun barrels and blasted to bits: a terrible death for them since they believe that you enter the afterlife in the exact condition you leave this one. Modern 'suicide bombers' are therefore ignorant of and blaspheming against their own beliefs.

When the British had reconquered the area around Delhi the East India Company was abolished and the Government took over. The Governor General became Viceroy and Prime Minster Disraeli had the nice idea of appointing Queen Victoria Empress of India (Kaisir-i-Hind). It should be noted that although India was an Empire (the Raj), it was NOT a colony, so the British didn't try to 'settle' the place as they, and other European powers, did elsewhere on the planet. When the time came to go, 90 years after the Mutiny, they only had to remove military forces and a few administrators. A handful of British people involved in trade and industry (especially tea planters) remained to work for the new Republic, but most knew that it was time to go back to Blighty.

[AndyG43]

More beautiful images & more fascinating history, thanks.

The Indian Mutiny was a pivotal point in British involvement on the subcontinent; after the Rebellion Britain dropped the pretext that her involvement was still largely commercial and it became an overtly Imperial occupation. In the 18th and early 19th century relations between the British and the Indians had been closer, with a degree of assimilation (one in three men married Indian women); after the Mutiny this was impossible, and the cliche of the British Raj grew quickly.

If anybody is interested in reading more on the subject, I can highly recommend the books by William Dalrymple & Geoffrey Moorhouse.

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Thanks Andy, I'd endorse both those writers. Dalrymple has written The White Mughals about interracial marriage between British and Indians before the Mutiny (fine if the Brits were important and the Indians were women from noble families) and The Last Mughal, a biography of Bahadur Shah, the aged claimant to the throne put back into 'power' by the Mutineers. Another very good writer on British India was Michael Edwardes who did a single volume history of the Mutiny, Red Year - and there's a good one by Christopher Hibbert, The Great Mutiny. All accounts reckon the Raj was a lot less fun after more British women arrived there!

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Worried about whether I'd spot the airport in these conditions.

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We were basically flying NNE, sometimes due North, and it was around 17.00 when we got there.

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I made a mistake and did a flightplan to to Indira Gandhi International (VIDP), the modern airport of Delhi. It shouldn't really be in GW3 at all, since it can only trace its history back to an RAF base of 1941.

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The correct airport would have been Safdarjung (VIDD) which was Willingdon, the original Delhi International. Sanjay Gandhi, one of Indira's sons and chosen successor, was killed trying to loop the loop at Safdarjung. After that his brother Rajiv (an airline pilot!) was groomed to be Prime Minister instead, but he was assassinated by an exploding bunch of flowers thrust into his face by a Sri Lankan woman. His Italian widow with the unlikely name Sonia, now leads the Congress Party, though she modestly draws the line at being PM herself. Indira was, of course, herself gunned down by one of her own Sikh bodyguards, which brings to mind the wise old Roman question: QUIS CUSTODET IPSOS CUSTODES?*

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I am thinking of writing (quite a long) book called Airports Named After People Who Were Shot... It might even be possible to do a Round the World flight visiting each one in turn...

* = Er...What Security do you have to check on your Security?

[Ralf Roggeveen]

So we touch down at the final destination, Delhi.

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There were DC-3s taxying about here.

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I was lucky with a sudden break in the weather just at the right moment.

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The other half of this route (which Alexander Frater did in his real-life reconstruction) would go all the way to Brisbane via Burma, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia and Darwin, another 20 stops or so. I will one day take some KLM aircraft on the Amsterdam - Batavia route.

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Researching this flight it's been interesting to learn what a small operator Imperial was in the 1920s/30s. The British were quite happy with the sea which they had used so successfully for so long. If anyone was going to emigrate and actually settle in the overseas Empire, they would go by ship. Passengers on aircraft tended to be working for the Government, or maybe Oil companies - mail was the most important cargo. Even today most air passengers are only going away for a short holiday - goods travel much more economically by sea, including oil.

Encountered these Dutch aircraft on the way:

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That may whet your appetite for the future Indonesia flight. Didn't show them at the time because they were in Basra, and of course KLM flew Baghdad - Bushire - Jask, but I'll get that right when we do go down to Batavia.


Hope you've enjoyed this one; thanks for all the comments and corrections, Gentlemen, they're always welcome: it's nice to know someone's reading it!

Here's a final shot of Willy's AI HP-42, it's only fair to let that particular aeroplane have the last word back in those Imperial days:


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[Willy]

Great flight Ralf!

[AndyG43]

Thoroughly enjoyable Ralf, thank you very much.

[tgibson]

Thanks Ralf, great job.