Percival Proctor
The Percival Proctor was a British radio trainer and communications aircraft of the Second World War, developed by Percival Aircraft Limited from the Vega Gull tourer. Ordered to Specification 20/38, it first flew on 8 October 1939 and remained in production through the war; 1,143 were built, 250 of them for the Royal Navy. Successive marks trained radio operators — the Proctor III for Bomber Command among them — while others flew communications work, and the enlarged Proctor IV stayed in RAF service until 1955. A civil Proctor 5 followed after the war, but the wooden fleet was grounded in the 1960s as its glued joints degraded; a few survive, in museums and, rebuilt, in the air.
Why It Mattered
The Proctor was the aircraft in which the wartime RAF and Royal Navy trained their radio operators, and which carried staff between airfields on communications work. It began in 1938, when a rapidly expanding Air Ministry ordered a radio trainer developed from Percival's Vega Gull tourer, to Specification 20/38. Production ran through the whole war and reached 1,143 aircraft, of which 250 went to the Royal Navy. The most numerous version was the Proctor III, a three-seat radio trainer built for Bomber Command, of which 437 were produced. From the first Air Ministry order the type had both jobs at once: the Mk I for communications and the Mk II for radio training.
Design Notes
The Proctor kept the shape of the Vega Gull it came from: a low-wing monoplane with fixed landing gear and a wooden airframe. Every mark used the same engine, the 210 hp de Havilland Gipsy Queen II, a six-cylinder inverted in-line engine. Adapting the tourer for military radios meant a fuselage six inches longer, larger rear cabin windows, and seats rearranged so the crew could wear parachutes. Most marks seated three; the Proctor IV had a longer fuselage and carried four — a pilot, an instructor and two trainees. The enlarged IV was at first to be renamed the Preceptor, but the new name was abandoned and it stayed a Proctor.
Operational History
The prototype, P5998, made the type's first flight from Luton Airport on 8 October 1939. Percival built the first 222 aircraft at Luton; most of the remaining production was the work of F. Hills & Sons of Trafford Park, who completed 812 Proctors between 1941 and 1945, assembling most of them at Barton Aerodrome. In service the Proctor I worked as a three-seat communications aircraft; the Proctor II and III that followed were three-seat radio trainers. In 1940 the prototype was even tried as an emergency bomber, but the scheme was abandoned once the invasion threat receded. When the war ended, more than 200 ex-military Proctors were sold off, and early marks found civil work in Australia, New Zealand and Europe. The Proctor IV remained in RAF service after the war, the last of them withdrawn in 1955. A civil version derived from the IV, the Proctor 5, went into production in 1945 for charter companies and flying clubs, and 150 were built new. The family ended with the Proctor 6, a single floatplane built for the Hudson's Bay Company in 1946.
Afterlife
Private owners kept Proctors flying into the 1960s, when the fleet was grounded because the glued joints of the wooden airframes were degrading. Australia shows the problem plainly: some thirty Proctors had been imported after the war, and in the 1950s the Department of Civil Aviation grounded every one on the Australian register after the wooden structure's glue bonding became suspect. Some survivors have since been rebuilt with modern adhesives, and a few — G-AKIU and G-ANXR among them — were airworthy in the 2010s. Others are museum aircraft: Proctor III LZ766 is on static display at the Imperial War Museum Duxford, and Z7197 is held in store by the RAF Museum at Stafford. The Moorabbin Air Museum's Proctor I arrived in Australia in 1951, was donated to the museum in 1965, and after a seven-year restoration completed in 1979 remains on display there.