closely the area directly above the weapon, which was rigged to fire vertically upwards, but on subsequent runs flew closer and closer to the flame to the point of almost bringing his aircraft directly into the line of fire. The pilot's report made it very clear that he did not believe the weapon to be a very effective deterrent, but admitted that the trials may have been biased by his foreknowledge of their nature. With this in mind, a second trial was arranged with a different pilot. No information at all was given to the man about what he could expect. The results were depressingly similar to those of the first trial — the pilot never wavered in his attack, actually brushing half of his wing into the jet of flame. However, it was discovered afterward that there might be another reason behind the failure of the second test. The pilot chosen for the runs had worked in a circus prior to the war, driving cars through rings and walls of fire on a regular basis. In the belief that the Luftwaffe would have very few men with circus experience, limited production of the Lagonda naval flamethrower began, with weapons being installed onto coasters working in and around the River Thames. The flamethrowers were welcomed by captains at first, until they discovered that the weapon required a very high level of maintenance and expert handling if the weapon was to have sufficient fuel-pressure to be effective, and the crew wished to avoid being coated in tar. While the installed flamethrowers did not produce a single confirmed enemy casualty before the end of the war, information gathered by the British Secret Intelligence Service suggested that the weapons had two noticeable effects upon the German armed forces. Firstly, trials were observed of a similar naval defensive flamethrower project involving a long mast-mounted pipe, which suffered similar setbacks to the British weapon — a number of trials ended with the attending officers and all others on the shore nearby being coated with oil. Secondly, partly as a result of the Lagonda flamethrower and partly due to other deterrent weapons such as the Parachute and Cable (PAC) system and the Holman Projector, the average height of German bombers attacking merchant ships increased to well above 200 ft, the altitude at which bombs had been successfully hitting on roughly 50% of the drops. Service history