page_title: Central Flying School RAAF
section_title: Origins and World War I
hierarchical_section_title: Central Flying School RAAF / History / Origins and World War I
caption_attribution_description: Unidentified men watching a Bristol Boxkite training aircraft flying over Point Cook, Victoria.
context_page_description: Central Flying School is a Royal Australian Air Force training unit, located at RAAF Base East Sale, Victoria. It operates the Pilatus PC-21 turboprop trainer. The school is responsible for training flight instructors, setting flying standards, and auditing flying practices. It is also home to the "Roulettes" aerobatic team. CFS was the first military aviation unit to be formed in Australia, in 1913, when its role was to provide basic flying training. Its current form dates from World War II, when it was re-established to train flying instructors for the Empire Air Training Scheme.
  CFS was inaugurated at Point Cook, Victoria, in March 1913, and trained over 150 pilots of the Australian Flying Corps during World War I. It was disbanded in December 1919, and the newly formed RAAF's No. 1 Flying Training School took on its function in 1921. Re-formed under EATS at Point Cook in April 1940, CFS relocated to New South Wales the following month, based first at Camden, then at Tamworth from April 1942, and finally at Parkes from January 1944. It returned to Point Cook in September 1944. By the end of World War II, the school had produced more than 3,600 instructors.
context_section_description: In December 1911, the Australian Department of Defence advertised in the United Kingdom for "two competent mechanists and aviators" to establish a flying corps and school. The following year, Henry Petre, an Englishman, and Eric Harrison, an Australian, were selected and commissioned as lieutenants in the Australian Military Forces. Petre arrived in Australia in January 1913; his first job was to choose a site for the proposed Central Flying School (CFS), which he was to command. Rejecting the government's preferred location near the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in Canberra, he selected 297 hectares at Point Cook, Victoria, to become, as George Odgers described it, the "birthplace of Australian military aviation". Petre and Harrison established CFS over the following year with four mechanics, three other staff, and five aircraft including two Deperdussin monoplanes, two Royal Aircraft Factory B.E.2 biplanes, and a Bristol Boxkite for initial training. Harrison made the unit's first flight in the Boxkite on 1 March 1914, while Petre, flying a Deperdussin later that day, registered its first accident when he crashed after snaring his tailplane in telephone wires. Its coterie of personnel by now referred to as the Australian Flying Corps (AFC), CFS commenced its first flying course on 17 August 1914, two weeks after the outbreak of World War I. The four students included Captain Thomas White and Lieutenants Richard Williams, George Merz, and David Manwell. Williams, who became the first to graduate, recalled the school as a "ragtime show" consisting of a paddock, tents, and one large structure: a shed for the Boxkite.
  A further eleven courses were run during the war years, graduating 152 pilots to a basic flying standard. Many of these students would go on to play a prominent role in the future Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), including Bill Anderson, Harry Cobby, Adrian Cole, Frank McNamara, Lawrence Wackett, and Henry Wrigley. The AFC's first unit to see active service, the Mesopotamian Half Flight, was raised under Petre's command and departed for the Middle East in April 1915; Petre's fellow pilots included CFS graduates White and Merz. Harrison took over the school's leadership in Petre's absence. The facilities were improved, and by the end of 1915, according to Wackett, they boasted "a good engineering workshop", "cottages for the married staff" and "a very comfortable officers mess". A year later, three AFC squadrons had been formed at Point Cook for service in the Middle East and France: Nos. 1, 3 and 4 Squadrons. In September 1918 the school, now made up of No. 1 Home Training Squadron, No. 1 Home Training Depot, and an aircraft repair section, became part of the Australian Imperial Force. Harrison was posted overseas in October and Major William Sheldon, former commanding officer of Nos. 2 and 4 Squadrons, was placed in charge of CFS.  Little training took place in the year following the November 1918 Armistice; staff mainly did "odd jobs" such as making survey flights and promoting government bonds. CFS's units were disbanded in December 1919 and the school taken over by the short-lived Australian Air Corps, formed on 1 January 1920. In 1921, CFS's function was assumed by No. 1 Flying Training School (No. 1 FTS), a unit of the newly formed RAAF.
caption: Bristol Boxkite over Point Cook, c. March 1916
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