Flights of Imagination

THE Beaufighter was flying way too low, 16-year-old Peter Aitchison and his brother realised as they watched it from a hill above Belhaven Bay in East Lothian. It was 1943 and the brothers looked on in horror as the twin-engined fighter-bomber thundered over the bay to hit the beach at Tynninghame, its training flight ending disastrously as it ploughed into the shoreline trees in a massive ball of flame.

"I said to my brother, 'Look, that plane doesn't seem able to control itself,' then it hit the high watermark," Aitchison, now 82, recalls at his home, not far away in West Barns outside Dunbar. "The flames were way up above the trees. The heat was terrible…" and he holds out a fragment of half-molten 20mm cannon shell he later retrieved from the wreck. "The sergeant pilot was killed."

This tragedy had an unexpected sequel for him 18 years ago, when he and his wife, Elma, were walking on that same stretch of shore and he spotted something protruding from the sand. It was a propeller blade, almost certainly from the same plane he'd watched explode all these decades before. Today, that salt-corroded blade is part of a £2 million exhibition complex which opened to the public last week at the National Museum of Flight at East Fortune, the former East Lothian airfield where the ill-fated Beaufighter was based. It is a stark reminder of the human cost involved in training aircrew during wartime, even before they saw combat. East Fortune had been an operational airfield from the First World War, when it was a base for airships on anti-submarine patrol, but it had become a training unit for Coastal Command by the time Aitchison left school at 14 in he early 1940s and started work as a "nipper" or tea boy for the contractor laying cables for the runway lighting there.

"It was a busy place then," he recalls. "Boulton Paul Defiants, and Harvard trainers with radial engines – what a bang they made when they took off. And later the Beaufighters. "The men working for the firm putting down the tarmac told me that they had an old-fashioned steam roller with a canopy, and they saw this plane coming up low. They ran away and its wheels took the canopy off the roller, but the plane kept going."

Others weren't so lucky. By the time he and his brother witnessed the Beaufighter crash, he had moved on to work elsewhere, but he had his fill of plane crashes. At Charterhall air base in Berwickshire he watched a Defiant's undercarriage collapse on landing, although on that occasion there were no casualties. Later, however, when he and his brother were working on a farm in Gloucestershire, he witnessed the last moments of a Mosquito and its crew. "It came over the trees and I thought it was going to land on top of me, but it veered and crashed nearby. I found the sergeant pilot – he had "Canada" on his shoulder, and his head was split open. You could see his brains.

"For years afterwards I had nightmares, dreaming about a plane and everywhere I went it followed me."

Aitchison, who was called up for the Army at the end of the war, but ended up as a "Bevin Boy", working in the coal mines, has been invited to the Museum of Flight on 27 April, when the new exhibitions will be formally opened by Air Chief Marshal Sir Glenn Torpy and Culture Minister Mike Russell. The event is bound to bring back memories, he agrees – "Oh aye. I'll be thinking of that poor man who was killed," he says of the Beaufighter pilot.

As graveyards at nearby Haddington testify, training itself was a hazardous business and more than 40 people were killed flying from East Fortune during the Second World War. "They were in the early stages of flying what were very difficult aircraft to handle," says Alastair Dodds, curator of transport with National Museums Scotland. "They were also training in all weathers, and the weather here can change very quickly." And he points out that the avenue of trees at the museum's entrance is lower on one side than the other because a Defiant crashed during take-off, going through the trees and killing both flyers.

Dodds reckons that the former air base's history hasn't been widely appreciated in the past, but believes that the new exhibitions will help change that. Housed in former wartime workshops, the two new displays, Fantastic Flight and Fortunes of War, provide insight into the site's role across two world wars, both as training airfield and airship base.

Stuart Allan, curator of the National War Museum, reckons the Fortunes of War displays emphasise both the historic role of the base and of those who served on it. "We have this fantastic aircraft collection here, but this exhibition shifts the focus a bit on to the people who flew and maintained them. We know that there were more than 40 people killed here. The training was dangerous; they had new aircraft and very tight training schedules because they needed the aircrew, and they just had to get on with it. If something went wrong, it could do so badly."

East Fortune was a strategically important base during the First World War for airships patrolling the North Sea, and among the exhibits are one of the propellers and the steering wheel from the R29, the only airship known to taken part in the sinking of a U-Boat. It was also an airfield for fighters patrolling against German Zeppelins – like the one which bombed Edinburgh in April 1916, as well as a training base for pioneering torpedo-dropping operations, with the planes involved, Sopwith Cuckoo biplanes, sometimes landing on the nearby beaches.

It's intriguing to imagine these flimsy looking biplanes and unwieldy dirigibles droning off into East Lothian skies, but by far the most spectacular craft to have taken off from the airfield was the record-breaking R34 airship.

On the night of 2 July 1919, some 600 servicemen and women hauled on ropes to ease the 643ft long airship out of its vast (and now long gone) hangar and release it into the smirry night. The giant airship, built by Beardmore at Inchinnan, Renfrewshire, took 108 hours to reach Long Island, New York, then returned to touch down at Pulham in Norfolk, chalking up the first transatlantic flight to America and back and the first east-west aerial crossing of the ocean.

Now visitors to the museum can "fly" this vast craft themselves on a state-of-the-art flight simulator created by the Glasgow School of Art's Digital Design Studio. Other hands-on exhibits housed in the former wartime buildings are designed to illustrate the principles of flight, and include a wind tunnel and a hot air balloon, while another simulator reproduces the G-forces created in a spiral dive. These new attractions are expected to draw more visitors to the museum, which in 2004 acquired a newly decommissioned Concorde as its flagship exhibit.

Concorde made a major difference to the museum's profile and its development will continue over the next decade, says Dr Gordon Rintoul, director of National Museums Scotland, fresh from executing a rather wizard prang on another of the new flight simulators. "We've introduced a host of new things for families in this Fantastic Flight section, while in Fortunes of War we're showing how this site was of huge importance during the First and Second World Wars, and what really brings it to life is all the reminiscences of people who were based here."

MEMORIES HAPPY AND SAD

AMONG accounts featured in the new audio-visual displays at East Fortune are those of Jean Crawford, of North Berwick, who was at last week's public opening, six-and-a– half decades on from serving as an airframe mechanic on the base's Beaufighters with the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). She recalls working outdoors in all weathers, "but my most vivid memories are of the pilots and aircrew who we met, passing through.

"Some of them," she adds, "were destined never to leave East Fortune. It was a very sad experience to see a plane burn out on the runway. Then there used to be target-towing flights down around Yellowcraigs, and if they went into the sea there was little chance of them getting out. But coming back here conjures up lots of faces, Canadians, Free French, Australians. It was quite a melting pot."

• For more information see www.nms.ac.uk/ museumofflighthomepage.aspx