Posted by Jon on September 07, 2006 at 15:00:40 from 199.159.117.62 user Jon.
In Reply to: Re: Bob & his history posted by Ian E-N on September 06, 2006 at 09:02:26:
Drawing such a distinction on the basis of pilot status may be presumptuous. Many of the pilots in the RAF were enlisted personnel; Sergeant Pilot was quite a common rank; these men may have achieved promotion to officer rank through attrition but a more realistic assessment would be on the basis of their initial ranks.
In Neville Shute's Pastoral we have the Danish med. student Sergeant Pilot Franck who's been re-assigned as Peter Marshall's navigator "because he's a Dane and they don't want to give him his own crew". As Shute worked closely with the RAF I think this can be presumed to reflect reality (and a level of caste-consciousness) at the time.
The US Army Air Forces had a comparable pilot rank "Flight Officer", more or less the modern "Warrant Officer" level, essentially a dead-end until the Army Air Forces decided that pilots should be officers whereupon many were commissioned.