17 December 1937

Dear Mother:

We have had lovely weather the last two days - fairly nice and warm.

Yesterday we had nine single seaters serviceable so indulged in a Squadron formation take-off and landing as well as exercises in the air. The combined noise is terrific and has to be heard to be appreciated.

The amount of air disturbed is terrific and often one gets into the slip stream of the aircraft in front and then up and down you sway and bump -rather terrifying as you nearly jostle adjacent aircraft.

They are pretty in echelon - all the red and blue wheels of A and B Flight and red and blue tails. The wheels are all still and not turning around which looks very odd.

Ordinary Squadron formation of nine machines (you should have 12) is thus:

P

P P

P P

P P P P

We are all chuckling about our Christmas cards. One the cover "Seek to Destroy" (The Squadron motto) and inside "Peace and Goodwill towards men".

The machine pictured is a Hawker Demon - two seat fighter as used by 41 in Aden during the Abyssinian Do. These machines carry bombs for dive bombing as well as a Lewis gun in back for rear gunner and two Vickers firing forward for the pilot.

Single seaters are not practical for work abroad as they haven't the range necessary for really long distances.

The single seater is built for high performance and carries very little petrol as compared with its other brothers.

I have pictures of our machines here which I will bring home with me.

Dad's remittance arrived yesterday and I have now engaged berths on boats.

There will only be two officers on the station at Christmas so Overall and myself have to do alternate Orderly Officer and Duty Pilot over Christmas week.

Today I flew up with a Sgt. Pilot and we did some camera gun attacks on each other for an hour. After we finished I led him around and we were cruising slowly along when a huge Whitley twin-engined bomber from Dishforth wheeled around on our tails and started to shoot us up (these things are fast, but we opened up and left them roaring away behind.

Dishforth a few miles away are equipped with the Whitley bombers. They are very huge night bombers and are of the latest type monoplane.

As you say it would be great if I was flying in Canada so I could fly and visit relatives etc. Here there isn't any point to it. But I will do a lot of it after returning to this country after the New year.

Well only a couple of weeks more eh?

Love Bill