Demi-gods to villains: how airmen fell to earth

Watching air power in action in Helmand this summer I was struck by its cold impersonality. From the ground, aircraft are often too high up to be visible in the flawless blue. Their presence is announced by a flash, a rumble and a sudden banner of smoke as a 21st-century bomb explodes in a mediaeval backyard.

The day of the glamorous airman is long gone. If people think about airmen nowadays, they are probably inclined to regard them as jet-borne Texan cowboys, as likely to drop a bomb on an Afghan wedding party as a Taliban training camp. Indeed, modern aerial warfare is a clinical business closer to video gaming than the blood and fire, skill and guts business practised by Great War pioneers like Mannock and Richthofen. Pilots no longer fight each other: the last one-to-one, twisting and jinking dogfight took place, obscurely, in 2000  in the skies over Ethiopia and Eritrea during the border war.

The men and women who fly jets in Afghanistan today have no connection with the battlefield; they are separated from reality by technology and euphemistic jargon that uses the language of the business school to describe the act of killing. A jet pilot these days faces remarkably little risk, at least from enemy action, though flying a support helicopter is a different matter. Nonetheless the three members of our air force who have been killed by insurgents in Afghanistan so far belonged to the earthbound RAF Regiment which protects Kandahar Air Field. And despite all the technnological sophistication of the kit, the screw up rate for the civilian population is appallingly high, with American blunders dealing death to hundreds of innocent Afghans.

The last one-to-one dogfight took place in 2000 over Ethiopia and EritreaThe Flyer by Martin Francis (£30, OUP) takes us back to a time when airmen were demi-gods and a slate blue uniform, preferably with a pair of wings sown over the  breast pocket, guaranteed admiration, gratitude and respect. Walking into a bar in RAF rig in the post Battle of Britain war years more or less guaranteed a slap on the back, a free drink and, if there were ladies present, the possibility of a kiss and a cuddle. Within a few months of the outbreak of hostilities airmen were lionized in films, plays and books. They were invariably brave but modest. Often, as with the popular cartoon figure of Pilot Officer Prune, who exemplified the RAF's vision of itself, they had a touch of gauche innocence.

The purpose of The Flyer is to explain why the RAF should have occupied the special place that it did in the minds of Britons, and not just during the war. Interest, not to say fascination, persists. My book Fighter Boys is still being reprinted more than five years after publication and there are plenty of others dealing with similar themes alongside it on booksellers' shelves.

That fascination is fairly easy to explain, then and now. On the Home Front  the RAF was the most visible of the three services. Its deeds were seen by hundreds of thousands, maybe millions. They watched RAF pilots battling the German raiders of the summer of 1940 and heard the nightly drone of bombers as they took off to wreak vengeance on Germany. They saved Britain then they hit back. The aviators were also sprinkled with the magic dust that in those days gilded everyone associated with the exalted world of flying.

Nowadays the legends are a comfort. They remind us of a time when causes were cleaner, choices simpler and men and women more noble. It is a beautifully blurred and honeyed image like a reflection in an old mercury looking glass.

Francis is an academic and after deconstructing the appeal of airmen in propaganda, literature, film etc sets out to erect a theory about the cultural and political significance of the wartime flyer. He concludes that the airman "encapsulated Britain's fraught encounter with modernity, his ambivalent persona symbolising a society that was capable of developing the extraordinarily advanced technology which made the air war possible but which remained fixated on the values of a fantasized pre-industrial past".

One feels inclined to respond as one suspects that Pilot Officer Prune might have done had he heard the author expounding his theories in the mess. "Whatever you say old man. Fancy another drink?"

Patrick Bishop's wartime romance A Good War is published in paperback by Hodder and Stoughton this week.  ·