Sustained effort : the life of Sir Leonard Isitt : a thesis presented in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Defence Studies at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines the life of Sir Leonard Isitt, and his contribution to New \nZealand aviation, first from a service perspective, and then considers his \ninvolvement with commercial aviation. Isitt commenced his military career \nas a foot soldier, serving first in Egypt during 1915, and then on the Somme, \nwhere he was seriously wounded in September 1916. While convalescing he \narranged a transfer to the Royal Flying Corps, where he trained as a pilot, \nbefore undertaking two tours of duty on the Western Front. After the War \nIsitt remained in the United Kingdom undertaking various courses, before \nreturning in late 1919 to join the embryo New Zealand Air Force. He became \nthe first Commanding Officer at Wigram, and then took command of the \noperational station at Hobsonville. When the Royal New Zealand Air Force \nwas created in 1937, he became the first Air Member for Personnel on the \nAir Board, and oversaw the build-up of personnel in anticipation of the \nSecond World War. With the declaration of war, Isitt was posted to Canada \nto monitor New Zealand’s contribution to the Empire Air Training Scheme, \nand was subsequently posted to Washington and London before returning to \nNew Zealand as Deputy Chief of the Air Staff in early 1943. In mid-1943 he \nwas appointed Chief of the Air Staff, the first New Zealander to hold this \nposition, and saw the RNZAF build its strength to 20 active squadrons, \nequipped with over 1300 aircraft and supported by 45,000 staff. At the end \nof the War, Isitt was chosen to sign the Japanese Surrender Document on \nbehalf of New Zealand at a ceremony on USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Isitt was \nknighted in 1946 and retired from the RNZAF to become Chairman of \nDirectors of the nationalised airline New Zealand National Airways \nCorporation. He also became Chairman of Tasman Empire Airways Ltd and \nserved as New Zealand nominee on the Board of British Commonwealth \nAirways Ltd. \nIsitt finally retired in 1963, after spending over forty years in the forefront \nof New Zealand aviation, and during this period arguably had a greater \ninfluence in this sector than any other person.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".