Word: command
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...Frederick's job as chief of the Atlantic Ferry Command has been "purely administrative." What Britons and Canadians wanted to know last week was why he had left his desk at Montreal's new Dorval Airport. They wondered whether the 61-year-old Marshal was slated to get a still more important command, even though Lady Bowhill, who works in the command's code room, this week had taken a new apartment in Montreal...
...deliver the planes, the next to use them. U.S. factories supply the planes-currently some 38 a day, but between Canada, where U.S. Army ferry pilots turn the ships over to the R.A.F., and Britain lie 2,000 miles of fog-strewn North Atlantic. The job of the Ferry Command is to fly to Britain the bombers that can make the long...
There are still more civilian than military pilots flying for the command, though the percentage is shrinking. Sir Frederick Bowhill believes that they are fairly well content. They know his office is open to them, and he notes that they have stopped complaining about the trip back to Canada. He has also silenced the loudest complaints that the R.A.F. pilots have voiced-by weeding out the loudest drunks among the Americans, by getting the military pilots' pay upped to something close to the civilians...
...Frederick Bowhill started his career by shipping before the mast. He sailed round the Horn in windjammers, worked his way up to a captain's berth. Today he is a Master Mariner, certified to command any ship of any size anywhere in sail or steam. But when in World War I the Royal Navy drafted him at 32, it did not put him on the bridge of a warship. Instead, he found himself on the "front porch" of an openwork biplane, learning to fly, then teaching himself the dangerous art of taking off from the deck of a merchantman...
...ferry flights, according to the command, are all routine, as monotonous for passengers as they are for the men who make them regularly. The only thrill comes when the plane passes the invisible point of no return, the point where it has enough gas to get across, too little to turn back against headwinds that blow from the west. The only real excitement is the landing-circling a field so well camouflaged that even experienced pilots have a hard time finding it, taxiing the plane into the line of delivered bombers whose next job is to fly over Europe with...