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Routine. Much of the routine is already achieved, as the record indicates. The biggest problem that Sir Frederick had to face when he began to turn Atfero into an R.A.F. organization was personnel.
Under Atfero all the planes were flown by civilian pilots, a choice Hollywood mixture of formula-wise young airline men, resourceful bush-flyers from the Canadian north, tough oldtimers who were veterans of everything from the Spanish Civil War to back-pasture flying services. The attraction was $1.000 a month ($800 for navigators, $500 for radiomen).
When the R.A.F. moved in and began to use young military pilots, the civilians looked down their noses. In spite of the high pay, some quit. Others stayed around and beefed. Their favorite complaints: that the R.A.F. treated civilian flyers like hired help, that the flight westward was not safe. All three of the shuttle planes were lost as the result of pilot error.
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'.
Sail, Steam, Wings. If the Atlantic Ferry really becomes routine and, as some pilots think, foreshadows peacetime round-trip flights at $150 a passenger, one of the men to thank will be the son of a British Army Colonel, Bowhill of Bowhill from the Scottish Border, who transferred his love from square-riggers to the awkward skyships of 1912.
Sir 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. From this kind of makeshift carrier, Flight Commander Bowhill flew on the first bombing against the German Navy in World War I.
During the rest of the war, Sir Frederick managed to turn up wherever there was an odd job to be done. In Mesopotamia he commanded a squadron of seaplanes flying off the Tigris. (He picked seaplanes so he could still fly if the Turks flooded the country.) He campaigned with General Smuts in Tanganyika. After the war he fought with the White Russians against the Bolsheviks.