A Chance to Fly

We could fly and we could get flying pay, 75 cents, and that was our authorization to go up. You weren’t supposed to be up without your chit. However, us timekeepers, we never turned in our chits. We always had them in case we could get the chance to go up. First time I ever went up was with an officer and he was on the night weather patrol like when they were night flying one of the instructors had to go up ahead of time to see how the weather was and I went up with them. And we used to from Dolphin in to Winnipeg if we could get a flip to Portage it took a two-hour train ride, otherwise it was an all night train ride so we’d love to get a flip in there. So we didn’t turn our flying pay request in because as long as we had that that gave us authorization to be up. And we did have one instructor that wanted to take us on a cross country flight and we thought no we won’t do that because there was no way we would have been authorized. We knew if there was a crash or anything his wife wouldn’t have gotten one penny because we’d have been in that plane and we weren’t authorized so we were at least smart enough to say no we won’t go.