One of the problems thrust upon the Royal Air Force by the arrival of the Jet Age was the need to re-organise its flying training set-up.

The old system, admirable though it was for a Fighter Command equipped with 400 m.p.h piston-engined interceptors, has had to be brought up-to-date. Now, as more and more of the R.A.F’s regular and auxiliary fighter squadrons change over to jets, the Fighter Command is beginning to get the benefit of a revised training system, under which its 600 m.p.h Jet Age pilots now go to a special Jet School.

The school is located at Driffield, in Yorkshire, and is known officially as No. 203 Advance Flying School. Opened as recently as last September, its first "course" of 25 pilots have just heard the results of their passing-out examination.

They gained 100 per cent success, and no man was better pleased than Air Chief Marshal Sir Ralph Cochrane, Chief of the Flying Training Command.

These first pilots trained at the new Driffield school will soon be on duty in the Fighter Command’s operational jet squadrons, flying twin-jet Gloster Meteors or single-engined de Havilland Vampires. At present they are at an operational conversion unit at Stradishall (Suffolk) where they are being trained to use, as a lethal weapon, the jet-planes they were merely taught to fly at the Yorkshire school.

Before the new Jet School was set up the new Fighter Command trainees selected for duty as jet pilots were given their advanced training in fast piston-engined fighters, including the latest Spitfires, before passing on to jets. Now, at Driffield, they go straight from 140 m.p.h. Harvard trainers to Meteors, and it is estimated that a saving of three months is effected in the training time for each pilot–an important consideration in view of Britain’s manpower shortage.

The need for this revised training programme is under-lined by the fact that, except for a small number of twin-engined Hornet squadrons, employed as long-range fighters, the Fighter Command today has no operational piston-engined aircraft in its regular first-line day squadrons.

What has made the Driffield school possible more than anything else in the development of the record-breaking 600 m.p.h Gloster Meteor in its two-seater form, known as the Mark VII, and which rather surprisingly to the layman, has proved even faster than its single-seat brother.

I recently flew in a Meteor VII of the kind in which the trainees at Driffield learn to fly at 600 m.p.h and climb at 5,000 feet a minute.

It was the most remarkable flight I have ever made, and I well imagine the enthusiasm, mingled with awe, with which the jet pupils in Yorkshire, fresh from their Harwards–four times slower–take over the controls as they sit in the front seat on their first dual flight. They accelerate down the runway so quickly that it is like being hit in the back, and they climb like a lift; so fast that the countryside quickly takes on the appearance of a small-scale map.

It is interesting to find in the Meteror that the most important instrument is the "Mach-meter" which tells the pilot at whatever height he happens to be flying, when he is approaching the plane’s dangerous speed from the point of view of compressibility. This is the force produced by an aircraft in "squeezing" the air in front of it as it approaches the speed of sound (760 m.p.h at sea level, and getting progressively slower the higher you go).

How close to the speed of sound a plane can go before getting into trouble varies according to its design features, including the thickness of the wings and their degree of sweep back. A jet plane’s Mach-meter–named after the Austrian scientist who invented it–tells its pilot how fast he is going in relation to the speed of sound. Clearly shown on the plane’s Mach dial is the percentage of the speed beyond which it could not go without getting into trouble.