Compulsory military training gave Southlander wings
For Ewen Rendel, compulsory military training in the early 1950s proved an introduction to the thrills – and chills – of flying a Tiger Moth.
Now 91, he was working for Southland Farmers when it came time to do his military training.
CMT, as it was known, was practised for males on and off, between 1909 and 1972.
It was in force in 1951, and young Mr Rendel, having left Southland Boys’ High School to help his mum May, by then a solo parent, was an 18-year-old working for Southland Farmers.
He decided he’d like a crack at air force training.
Slight potential problem being that he was far from a maths whiz at school – playing fives was more his forte.
He figured that might seriously count against him. But in 1951 the Korean War was being fought and the government was of the view that escalation was a real risk and it could need pilots in a hurry.
“That was the only reason I got flight time in the moths,’’ he recalled. “I didn’t have the maths, but that didn’t seem to matter.’’
What did matter was how he performed when he was taken up for a test flight at Invercargill, where his bodily fortitude was put under pressure by the instructor’s dramatic manoeuvres. “They did stunts to see who would get sick and who wouldn’t. One fella was sick and that put him out of the running. But I was okay.’’
What followed was 22½ hours of tandem flying and 15½ hours of solo flight.
Rendel pulls out his log book and the details are still there.
“Spinning, forced landings, aerobatic loops, stall turns, slow rolls …’’
And it was an open cockpit so during those upside-down times, “you had to make sure you were strapped in properly’’, he said.
Southland’s weather was certainly a factor. He recalled biking out to the airport one bitterly cold day, which was bad enough, only to then go into the air and get almost snap-frozen. “Hell, it was cold.’’
But the liberation of flying, particularly when his instructor Jack Hart had brought him to the standard of solo flights, was simply unforgettable.
The young pilot wasn’t altogether averse to a little aerial larrikinism.
His mum was a matron at a rest home for elderly women, so it struck him as only polite to pay them all a low-level visitation.
“If the instructors had found out about that ...” he said with a chuckle. “We weren’t supposed to go down too low over town.’’ And the reaction from the ladies? “Oh, they thought it was marvellous. I can still see them now, all dressed in black in those days.’’
The military had further training lined up for him. In Burnham camp he trained as a bren gun driver.
A New Zealand Defence Service Medal acknowledges his achievements.
Mercifully, the Korean War never escalated to an extent that posed a domestic threat to New Zealand, so combat time for Rendel and others of his intake was not required.
But that didn’t leave him grounded. He has been no stranger to the skies above Mandeville, where the versatile old aircraft have time and again taken him aloft in tandem flights, well into his senior years.