Flying the Furrow
By Allan Jones
I like simming aviation history. It grabbed me particularly with the release of FS2004: A Century of Flight, even though I had FS2002 previously. Later on, that led to my interest in the WWII Air Transport Auxiliary flights and a series of articles on FlightSim.Com under the umbrella title 'Fly & Deliver'.
I was recently reading Alexander Frater's book, Beyond The Blue Horizon, published in 1986, the story of re-flying the original London to Australia route using then-modern commercial flights. It gave rise to the following sim in a similar vein, drawn from the facts and anecdotes in Frater's account.
The pioneering air service between England and Australia was provided by Imperial Airways, and it had a few tricky bits along its route. Some were due to political squabbles and others arose from aviation challenges. In the nineteen twenties and early thirties, it was all daytime flying, of course, other than the Paris to Brindisi section, in which passengers travelled by train. With overnight stops in fine hotels, it took twelve and a half days, but the journey was still a lot faster than by ship.
Imperial Airways selected aircraft tailored to each segment of the route; the Handley-Page H.P.42, the Short 17 'Kent', the Armstrong Whitworth AW15 'Atalanta' and, with Qantas across Australia, the De Havilland A86 Express. Part of the reason for this mix was that the route evolved in stages, as commercial air travel from Europe moved into Africa, India and the South Pacific. The service provided gracious luxury for the small number of elite passengers who used it, as well as an adequate cargo space for the lucrative air mail contracts.
Take the H.P.42, for example. It was a long, blunt-nosed biplane with an interior more akin to a Paris salon. Its cockpit would do justice to the cab of a vintage steam locomotive. Rated at a cruise speed of 100 mph, pilots claimed they never achieved that. In time, KLM may have sped past the H.P.42 with their Fokker FVII fleet, but the dinner service, wines and cigars served in the salon were excellent.
The segment from Jordan to Syria began at Ziza, south of Amman, and terminated at Ramadi, west of Baghdad. For this stretch the RAF had already come up with an innovative navigation solution. The desert was rather more uniform than the South Downs or the Rhone Valley, and far less hospitable. Worse still, it was without useful landmarks. So the RAF made one, called the Furrow.
This navigation technique wouldn't go down too well environmentally these days. Take two teams of engineers, one at the departure airstrip and the other at the arrival point. Send them to meet in the middle, ploughing out a furrow, or painting the rocky areas that you can't plough. The resulting furrow was about two meters wide and 470 miles long. The pilots took off, climbed a bit then followed the line. Hours were spent wrestling the controls through the blustery desert thermals before they landed. A new acronym entered the aviation world - FTF, Fly the Furrow.
Some people thought it was too easy, or cheating; altogether too boring. The proper way to fly was by compass, dead reckoning and prayer over a 500 mile tract of desert. With the Furrow, they argued, the pilots would get bored and fall asleep.
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