Winkle: The Extraordinary Life of Britain’s Greatest Pilot

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I knew Eric Brown for nearly 40 years – he was Superman, absolutely brilliant,” says Beaver. “I knew him at the time that he was just becoming a national treasure. He had written a lot about aeroplanes, but there was nothing really about his character.”

It was partly for his service on board Audacity that Brown was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. 6. He tested experimental Nazi planes That immediately called into question Eric’s autobiography and our perceived knowledge. It also led to six years of research, writing, re-writing and editing. There were searching questions and my aim of writing about the man not the machines came sharply into focus. Before becoming one of Britain’s elite test pilots, Eric had a very full WWII combat career which included being shot up and making a forced landing with multiple injuries and also survived the sinking of his ship, HMS Audacity. Brown seemed a shoo-in to join the Royal Air Force during the Second World War but there was a hitch – when the 19-year-old aspiring pilot reported to the recruiting office in Edinburgh, he was told sign-ups were at capacity and there was a three-month wait.Captain Eric Brown, RN, is one of the titans of flight testing. Nearly 500 types in his logbook, around 3,000 arrested landings, and a reputation as the greatest carrier suitability test pilot in history. This book is a good biography of him, with some revelations...but also some surprising gaps. On the morning of May 8, 1920, an overnight train pulled into Waverley Station in Edinburgh. A carriage had been chartered by the National Children’s Adoption Association and among the “unwanted” babies on board was a boy, only a few months old.

He would see action in the Battle of the Atlantic and be involved in the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The latter experience haunted him for the rest of his life. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Admiralty Official Collection - IWM / Public Domain 2. He rode in a ‘wall of death’ stunt – with a real lion The Winkle biography has its gestation in 2009 at what we all thought was Captain Eric Brown’s 90th birthday. We discussed a biography, and I followed it up a little later to get a typical Eric response: ‘of course, dear boy but start work after I have passed on.’ By the way, he was only 89. Eric must have looked a bit forlorn, so Glenn asked him, ‘Can you play an instrument?’ Of course, Eric couldn’t, but he said, ‘I can play the drums’, which is actually not true. So, he became the second drummer and just drummed away.”He carried, to his dying day, pieces of plexiglass lodged in his cheek and mouth that they couldn’t operate on and remove,” says Beaver. “To land on an aircraft carrier that is moving 60ft up and down, whilst wounded and with one eye inoperable because it is coated in blood, is quite remarkable.” Brown’s military experience comes mostly from known material, with enough added detail to provide spice, and not inconsiderable horror, to his early combat flying, and his being aboard Audacious when she was torpedoed. His survival—like many instances in his flying career—was near miraculous. Besides meticulous preparation, he embodied what has been described as essential for successful aviators: almost pathological self-confidence.