I’m a sucker for teach-yourself manuals.

Now, in 1938, a British gentleman by the name of Nigel Tangye published with Hodder & Stoughton a small handbook called Teach Yourself to Fly.
The volume was reissued in 1941, as a quick-and-dirty crash course for RAF newbies.

Now, c’mon, this is the 21st century – we are leery, and pretty skeptical, of one-package crash courses and Idiot’s/Dummies books about using Twitter or Mexican cooking.
And here’s a 75-years-old, 170-pages booklet, claiming to be the one-stop beginner’s course for fighter pilots?
In war situations?
One has to scratch one’s head, and wonder how gullible were they back in those days.

But as they say, desperation sharpens the wit.
1941 was a hard time in Britain, and every small edge counted.
Learning the basics of flight while you rode on the train to the airbase where you’d fly a fighter plane against the Luftwaffe was, possibly, such an edge.

Squadron Leader Nigel Tangye, a Royal Navy College graduate and an Air Service veteran, sure knew how to write – as a journalist he had covered the Spanis Civil War.
His handbook is concise, short on theory and strong on practical advice.
And is a great read.
Consider the beginning of the Seventh Chapter:

Now you come to the most difficult part of your course of flight instruction — approaching and landing. It is difficult because it cannot be done without perfect judgment, and judgment only comes with experience. So many times a pupil does everything well in the air, but when he comes to learn how to land, nothing seems to go right, and he gets discouraged.

Discouraged.
You have to love the understatement.

Now I’m not planning on sneaking into the local Air base and… ehm, borrow a fighter to try what I learned from this book.
But apart from the retro-style pleasure of handling and reading such a book (Hodder reprinted it in fac-simile edition in 2008), this is a great resource for writing: this is a hands-on description of what flying was about in the ’30s
We get an overview of the cockpit, the basic controls, taking off and landing, and finally some guidelines for cross-country flying, acrobatics (!) and emergency landing.
Nice and smooth.

Sure – Biggles books and Flying Aces magazine stories were not written based on a flight manual, but on the other hand, the “write from experience” bit in our writing toolbox means we need to know at least the basics of what we are describing.
Teach Yourself to Fly is the sort of resource which I love – a nice read, providing period details, easily referenced.

It’s also the sort of book I guess might go and form thebasis of a “pulp hero’s library”.
After all, where did The Shadow learn to fly his autogyro?

Tangye, who also worked as a consultant and designer on the adaptation of H.G. Wells’ Things to Come and married actress Ann Todd, would later become a respected author of books on Cornish folklore and history.