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Brown was one of few pilots to successfully fly one of these, having signed a disclaimer for the German ground crew.
Wings on my sleeve : Brown, Eric Melrose : Free Download Wings on my sleeve : Brown, Eric Melrose : Free Download
A typical page in his logbook shows that on a single day he made eight flights, one each in the Bell Kingcobra, Gloster Meteor I, Supermarine S. I was lucky enough to meet the author of this book in April 2014 when he was doing a talk in Cambridge University on flying captured German aircraft at the end of World War 2 and what an experience it was!Thomlinson, John Noble and Charles Crowfoot, whom he records (with "others") as being responsible for "giving the Royal Navy a technical lead in aircraft carrier equipment which it still holds to this day [1978]. On 3 December 1945, Brown became the first pilot to land on and take off (pictured) from an aircraft carrier in a jet aircraft, when he flew a de Havilland Sea Vampire to HMS Ocean. Briefly he had a truly remarkable life as a Navy pilot in World War 2 progressing to a test pilot position and then after the war holding senior ranking positions in the Royal Navy.
Wings on My Sleeve - Google Books
Eric Brown joined the Fleet Air Arm and went on to be the greatest test pilot in history, flying more different aircraft types than anyone else. Eric Brown started as a humble RNVR volunteer, a University student from Scotland at the start of World War 2 and retired at the top of the British Fleet Air Arm. Brown was obviously a supremely gifted flyer who could learn an aircraft very quickly and evaluate it to the edges of its envelope as few could. As a result of Doolittle's request, early in 1944 the P-38H Lightning, a Packard Merlin-powered P-51B Mustang and P-47C Thunderbolt were dived for compressibility testing at the RAE by Brown and several other pilots.
In 1939 Eric Brown was on a University of Edinburgh exchange course in Germany, and the first he knew of the war was when the Gestapo came to arrest him. To recount any of them here would be a disservice to the man, so if you have any interest in WW2 or aviation then make this a top priority read. Suddenly the stick cracked over into the corner, the ailerons locked and she stalled with a bang, turning almost completely upside down. In spring 1945, he wrote, the company was instructed by the government to hand over the M52 plans to the US. The North American B-25 Mitchell had been flown off a carrier earlier during the attack on Tokyo led by James Doolittle; however the aircraft had been loaded aboard the carrier by crane.
Eric Brown (pilot) - Wikipedia Eric Brown (pilot) - Wikipedia
He has tested almost every plane type during WWII not only British but American, German, Japanese, and Italian. We were in Halifax; we deployed aboard and headed off to the south to participate in an exercise which was an exercise against the nuclear Skipjack—nuclear submarine Skipjack—to see how it fared against it. In a throwback to his days testing aircraft in high speed dives, while at the RAE Brown performed similar testing of the Avro Tudor airliner. He is very relaxed about the long period he spent as a test pilot and shrugs the obvious risk at a time when many of his colleagues were falling out of the sky during the test flying of the first jet aircraft and the first encounters with the sound barrier. The venture was not without risk, as before their capture, the Germans had destroyed all the engine log books for the aircraft, leaving Brown and his colleagues no idea of the expected engine hours remaining to the machines.
It's obviously my favourite one but I guess we go back when the first carrier that—well, we've had five carriers in the navy that not too many people know of: Puncher, Nabob and from 1948 on, we had Warrior, then Magnificent and then Bonaventure. He has a great combat record in WWII but is now mostly remembered for being the only pilot trusted to test-fly virtually any aircraft. He expected to arrive at a liberated aerodrome, just after it had been taken by the British Army; however, German resistance to the Allied advance meant that the ground forces had been delayed and the airfield was still an operational Luftwaffe base. However, he manages to keep his personal life completely out of it apart from a few vague references to his wife and children.
Book Review: Wings On My Sleeve - HistoryNet
In an era of outstanding test pilots,” said the one-time Hawker chief test pilot Bill Humble, “‘Winkle’ was simply the best.
This is an understated and witty book with a laconic view of the air war, human foibles, the nature of courage and being (somewhat within safe boundaries) fearless. Short for "Periwinkle", a small mollusc, the name was given to Brown because of his short stature of 5ft 7in (1.
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