He is one of the 20th century's greatest aviators. He has played a major part in the evolution of flight and in the process set records that will never be broken. My father was in the Royal Flying Corps during World War I. Now, originally he was a balloon observer and that was a fairly hazardous occupation. And after a while he decided that it might be a little less dangerous if he became a pilot. So he switched to flying. He always encouraged me in this flying business and he operated from an airfield fairly close to home at Turnhouse in Edinburgh, where there was an auxiliary Air Force squadron flying lost a gamecocks when I was, I think, about eight years old, he took me up in a gamecock and sat me on his knee. And of course, at that age I hadn't the leg lens to reach the rudder pedals, so he let me handle the stick a little. We didn't do anything acrobatic. My father was in an organisation which was often set up after World War I of former combatants meeting to change their experiences and just generally socialise in Germany. This group was led by Ernst Udet, the popular Great War flying ace. In 1936, Eric and his father visited its members in Berlin. We went with the joint purpose of watching the Olympics and enjoying the socialising with the former Luftwaffe. And indeed, Udet asked me if I'd like to go for a flight with him. And this was unexpected, but he took the time off to drive me down to an air field called Haller, south of Berlin, where he had a booker young man. He did a lot of manoeuvres that really tested my stomach rather to their limits. But at about probably 100ft, he turned the aircraft upside down and we approached the hallway down till I would say about 50ft, inverted towards runway. And I thought, really, this was my demise looming on the horizon. But at about 50ft, he turned it over, which, with its wingspan, didn't give it too much clearance on the ground. And as we settled upright, so to speak, he just flopped onto the runway and burst into roars of laughter because he knew it frightened the life out of me. On the way home, he said to me, you must work on your German and you must try and get into a flying organisation. If you achieve something in Berthies, come back and see me. In 1938, the teenaged Brown revisited Germany, this time alone. I looked up Udet in Berlin. He'd given me his address and to my astonishment, he greeted me like a long lost chum. Here we were in Nazi Germany. How was the feeling? It was one of excitement, really, because everything was happening at that time in Germany and there were parades, glow. And although this is all very militaristic to a young boy like myself at that time, it was exciting stuff. There didn't seem to be any unemployment. And for the young in the country, there was almost endless aviation facilities. So that was Germany and 38 point. Back in Scotland, Eric had by now progressed from Edinburgh's Royal High School to the city's famous university. Here he learned to fly. The University Air Squadron was connected at Edinburgh with the six or three Auxiliary Air Force Squadron. And we were training then on what was a fairly new trainer, the Miles Magister, and after that, Gloucester gauntlets. These were being supplied at this point to Auxiliary Air Force squadrons. It was a lovely aeroplane there's, a little gauntlet, an acrobatic gem, really. It was a four year course, my honours degree in modern languages. The Foreign Office used to visit the university, the languages department, looking for possible bright boys to recruit. And I was asked if I would be interested in joining the diplomatic corps, and I said I was. Since German is your primary language, you'll have to spend at least six months in Germany. You will be sent to a school on our recommendation and you will teach English. In summer 1939, Brown went to Zalim School near Lake Constance. It was really a delightful establishment. I'd gone up on the 3 September 1939 to spend the weekend in Munich. Good, delightful town, I have to tell you. And I was lucky boy. In those days I owned an Mg magnet. I had taken that with me and it was parked in the courtyard. And at 06:00 in the morning of the 3rd of September, there was a thunderous knock on my door and in came a lady with two SS officers and said, our countries are at war and I'm afraid you'll have to come with us, and was taken to an SS jail. I wasn't treated badly at all. My concern was, here we are, at the very beginning of a war. How long is it going to last? Am I going to be here for the duration? On the third day, this young SS lieutenant said to me, you're being taken as a Swiss frontier for an exchange through the Red Cross, which I was delighted. The only thing the SS would let Brown keep was his car, because we have no spares. I got to Bern and the Ambassador interrogated me there and told me that in the light of the fact I was in the University of Squad and I better get back as quickly as possible, this was the period of what's called the phoney war. Well, there wasn't much activity going on operationally, and I, being young and keen, found this very inactivity, very boring, frankly. And by the middle of September, the Royal Navy had an aircraft carrier, the Courageous, sunk in the Southern Irish Sea, and they lost most of the pilots in that sinking. And a notice went up on the RAF notice board saying that the fleet alarm was short of pilots and if anybody would like to move over, would they put the names down. I was accepted by the fleet alarm, but then wanted me to do that course of training. This course began at Sydneyham, near Belfast. It was here that Eric first met Lynn McCrory, his future wife. The training took Brown to various Royal Naval air stations. It was over a year before I actually got a pursting to a squadron that was going to go on an aircraft carrier. By the time I got my pursing to my first squadron, the Americans had offered us a thing called the Grumman Wildcat on lease land. Now, this was an exciting aeroplane for us because it was, if you compare it, probably up to the performance capacity of the Hurricane, which was the RAF's top fighter at that time. So it was very exciting to be drafted into a squadron that had this aircraft, because it was a first class aircraft of rugged good firepower, specially built for deck landing. In April 41, Eric and Lynn became engaged. The following month, he was flying a wildcat down from Scotland to Croydon for modification. I ran into atrocious Weather and crept my way, thankfully, into RAF Cranwell. To my utter surprise, there were just hordes of civilians alarmed, so I wondered what was going on, but nobody would tell me. The next day, Cranwell's Air Traffic Control asked Brown to perform some weather tests. As the cloud base was low from the air, I could see this activity at one hanger. Finally, around about 07:00 in the evening, it was beginning to lift and there was further activity at this hangar. And they eventually rolled out an aircraft, a like of which I'd never seen before, because it had no propeller, of course. This was Britain's first jet aircraft, the Gloucester E 28 39. The pilot taxed it out the runway and I watched this thing take off. It did a fairly short flight before it landed very smoothly and a huge hoard of people dashed over and surrounded it. And prominent amongst them was a wind commander, an RAF uniform, and of course, this was Frankfurtwell. In summer 1941, Brown and his squadron transferred to HMS Audacity, britain's first escort carrier. She had been captured from the Germans. It was originally a banana boat. Churchill put up the idea that if they just sliced the top off this vessel, put a flat flight deck on, we'd have a small carrier which would be ideal for escorting convoys. Now, it was very basic, whereas a normal aircraft carrier these days had a flight deck with a length of about 800ft. This little vessel total length was 420ft. It had only two arrested wires and then an emergency arrest of wire, which we called the for Christ's sake, wire in the Firth of Clyde, brown would make his first deck landing. Half of the pilots in the squadron had been on the bigger carriers before, and when they saw this small thing, it must have frightened the life out of them. But to me, I had never seen an aircraft carrier before, so it was just another adventure and a challenge and frankly, I enjoyed it. From the air, it looked like a matchbox floating in the sea, but I didn't find any great trouble with it, frankly. And I did my four landings, I think it was, and that qualified me. And we were off. Shortly into operations, the Audacity and its aircraft first accompanied a merchant convoy in September 1941. The ships sailed between Liverpool and Gibraltar, a strategic pillar of Britain's empire that was key to winning the war and keeping the country supplied. We knew we were going to have a rough time. The Beer Biscuit has noted for its bad weather, heavy seas. Our real targets were the Focker Wolf 200, which had been known as a civil airliner called the Condor, but had been modified into a very, very potent four engine reconnaissance bomber. It was a great threat to the convoys, giving their position to the Uber Wolfpacks, which were allowed, and they closed on the convoys and attacked mainly at night, of course. In our very first voyage, we came across the first of these. Two of our aircraft went up to a Tag. It had bombed the convoy and caused few casualties. These were transported onto a hospital ship we had with us and in spite of it flying the Red Cross, the Condo bombed it. It was caught up by the first two Wildcats and the pair were our commanding officer and his wingman. And the CEO set the inner engine of the Condor and fired. He went in to have a closer look at what damage he had done and they opened fire and he turned away rapidly. But a cannon shell went clean through the underbody of the aircraft and killed him. So we lost our Co within minutes of the first combat. How do pilots feel and react when they first see the UVA? Well, of course it's a thrill because it's a dark, menacing shape. It really looks evil. It is electrifying and you feel a little helpless. The first major attack, I should say was made in a submarine was by our co's wingman and he dived down on it, but they had manned their 20 mil on the the casing thing and actually shot him down. And we found out later when his body was recovered that the shell had gone through and hit the stick. I later on found two U boats on the surface with a plank between them, well, out from the convoy, of course, and obviously one of them was in serious trouble of some sort and because they were moving across this plank and helping one another. And when I caught them, they were still engaged in this and I killed quite a few of them walking or in this area. It is hard to imagine the reality of this kind of naval warfare. Deck landing was a very difficult business to judge. I mean, the back end of the vessel, the worst we had was it was moving through a knock of 60ft. Now, that was virtually impossible for landing, but we were up there and had to get back. Bad enough for the pilots, but think of the poor ground crew with no hangar. These six aircraft were parked at the stern, tied down by cables at night and were being serviced. The only time that they were available for servicing was in the dark at night. These troops were going around with a back end, moving up and down, water pouring over them, slippery conditions with a small torch, with a piece of blue paper over the front to look into the engine, etc. I think they were pushed to the limit. We knew as pilots that our life depended on these guys. During the convoy's return trip, Brown's aircraft was hit by a Condor. This shell smashed through my windscreen and a large piece of the glass from the screen came in into my mouth. I think this concussed me. Apparently my wing leader, I was the number two, came alongside me, realised I had been hit and was afraid that I would become unconscious and that would have been that. So he kept talking to me all the time, trying to keep me going. He said I wasn't responding, but appeared to be doing what he told me to do with the aircraft. And he talked me down onto the deck and I have no recollection of landing on at all. But I caught the for Christ's sake, why? Brown suffered further injuries when landing and was out of action. Until the convoy reached Britain, the Condor remained a huge threat. I then studied this aircraft very carefully to see where its armament was and how it could bring it to bail against an attacking aircraft. And I realised that there was no blind spot except from the front. Brown discovered there was a limit to how far the Condor's upper and lower front gunners could move their cannon before they were in danger of hitting their own fuselage. This left the Condor vulnerable to a head on attack. On the second convoy to Gibraltar, Brown put his discovery into practise. When I eventually managed to get this aircraft into a situation where he was nipping in and out of cloud, it was rather difficult to keep up with him. Eventually, I made an absolutely flat attack. When I opened fire, I could see the pilot's windscreen shattering. As soon as I did that, it began to fall down in a very flat attitude into the sea to such a degree that two of the crew managed to crawl out of it. So they probably drowned there. I would think so. That was my first attack and I had a similar one the second time. The other guys quizzed me on this, of course, and they all adopted the same thing. We brought down four more using the head on attack. On reaching Gibraltar, the convoy's escort fighters were flown into the Colony's newly built aerodrome for further maintenance and to enable the pilots to keep in practise brown's convoy set back for Liverpool, commanded by Frederick Walker from Spain. German spies noted its departure. After leaving Gibraltar, we were put under immense attack. We were a slow convoy, five lines of vessels, about four or five in a line. Walker would put the carrier right in the middle line so it was furthest away from attack. But our captain, who was senior to Walker, made his own decision. He decided that was putting the merchant ships at too much risk with a large number of Uberts attacking so he came out into the open and decided he'd zigzag throughout the night clear of the conqueror. We'd been doing that for maybe an hour or so when a u-boat fired a random torpedo at us in the hope of having a strike because we were zigzagging at 14 knots and as luck his luck would have it, hit a rudder, carried the rudder away. The u-boat surfaced about 200 yards on our port side and we could see the captain of the u-boat on quite clearly on the conning tower with the braid of his hat and our captain called all the crew of the Audacity onto the flight deck. There was this uncanny period which may have been as much as ten minutes, where we were looking at each other when one of the sailors nerves broke and he rushed into one of our 20 millimetre cannon and opened fired the u-boat in retort. They kept the u-boat, fired four torpedos, all of which struck us and the entire bows carrier fell off. And of course when they went she tipped up immediately and as she did the cables holding down the wildcats at the back all snapped. I'll never forget the twang as they snapped and they came rushing down the deck into 400 sailors and just wiped out dozens of them, knocking them over the side, killing them on impact and so on and so forth. Utter chaos. I realised what was going to happen so I went immediately to the side and jumped off. This is the 21 December and the bear biscuit. It wasn't going to be warm in there. I find myself with my flight leader. We were left for three or 4 hours in the water. He and I tied ourselves together and then got a group of sailors, we were 26 in all and we all tied ourselves together with the bits of cord and string we had and obviously hypothermia was setting in and as they fell asleep, they toppled forward and just drowned. And of course they were dead weight and I'm afraid we had to be ruthless and just cut each one that drowned off. And after 3 hours, I'm afraid the only one surviving of the flight command and myself. The reason being we had made wests, which supported our necks, our heads, kept them above water. And it is a horrible thing to realise that your companions are just not surviving. The corvettes came back and they hoisted us out of the water. The captain, he was being hauled up when the line snapped and he went forward. And they think he stuck the hull of the corvette and knocked him unconscious because he just went in the water and vanished while off duty. Eric and Lynn got married. Two months later, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for bravery and skill in action against enemy aircraft. During the convoys, we were all recalled to reform the squadron with Hurricanes at Yebleton in Somerset. But just prior to embarking, I was told that I was required to be kept behind for a series of trials of Hurricanes and Spitfires on escort carriers. Now, why was I tossed into the test world? I didn't discover till later on that the captain of the Audacity had written in my confidential report that I had a facility for deck landing and they should try and make use of this. That's why I was hauled out, to see if Hudakin could be landed on an escort carrier and then a CFA. Both trials were successful. So from then on, I was allotted to this test unit called the Service Trials Unit for the Navy. This was based at Crail in Scotland. Here, Brown rapidly expanded his tally of deck landings in his new role as a test pilot, he was also promoted to lieutenant. By spring 1943, the Allied landings in Sicily were imminent. The role of the RAF was to attack land targets, but its pilots would need to return to aircraft carriers pending the capture of Italian air bases. This made it vital to train air crew, both British and Canadian, in deck landing. I was sent to Kenley to teach the Canadians they were not very receptive. They were heavily involved in their own kind of walls. With Spitfires and Canadians being what they are, the only way I could get them to agree to do some deck landing training was they said, we'll do one for every sorte you do with us. So this was the deal. So I did a few what they called rhubarbs and things like this over in France. There were shoals of alone, so one had to keep one's wits about one to survive. Terrible things here, but I enjoyed it, frankly. And you're not supposed to enjoy wars, but there you are. The spirit gets to you. After 14 months at Crail, brown was posted to the Test Evaluation Squadron at Boscombe Down. I had been almost entirely a single engine piston engine pilot, and suddenly I was thrown into a place where twins and four engine aircraft abounded. I'd only been at Boscombe down just a month when I got a phone call from the Admiralty. They rang me up and asked me if I thought it was possible to land a Mosquito on a carrier. To an engineer the aircraft with all the brash confidence of youth, I said, oh, yes, do that. And so they said, Right, you're on your way to Farnborough. At the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough. Brown would become Chief Naval test pilot. I had never even seen a Mosquito until I got to Boscombe Down. So I had to learn to fly the aircraft and work up on it to land it on a carrier. They called it Mission Impossible because the stalling speed of the Mosquito with everything down was 110 miles an hour. And the buffins at Farmra said that the maximum speed that the arrestor wires would accept a Mosquito on a carrier was 86 miles an hour. Normally you land on with a little engine power as you come onto counter, but with this I'd have to use almost half engine power and hang on the propellers and until I was about maybe 3ft off the deck, then cut the engines when the aircraft would just fall out of the sky. So it was quite a hazardous thing. And yet the trials went very successfully. Of course, the Navy were alerted to the fact that twin engineed aircraft could be operated on a carrier and they offered so much more potential. At Farnborough, Brown worked on many projects apart from naval test flying. The war in Europe had been basically at what we call low to medium level, that is to say heights, not much above 20,000ft. This all changed in 1943 with the arrival of the 8th United States Army Air Force with the Flying Fortresses. Because they operated at 30,000ft. So suddenly, the whole war was transformed into a high level war. Now, once you do that, you run into problems associated with flying in thin air near the speed of sound. These problems created a phenomenon called compressibility. An aircraft sends a pressure wave ahead which opens the air for it to pass through. But to fly faster, the aircraft must fly higher where the air is thinner. At high altitude, the speed of sound is less. And these pressure waves do not have the time to open up the passage of air for the aircraft. Instead, they compress against each other. This compressibility builds up a barrier of air ahead of the aircraft. If you strike this barrier of air, it is literally like running into a brick wall and you get huge amount of vibration and you get the worst thing is a vast change of trim. The aircraft suddenly goes nose down. In January 1944, general Jimmy Doolittle became commander of the 8th Air Force. At that time, they only had us fight escort, either the P 38 Lightning or the P 47 Thunderbolt. He realised that the losses were still heavy. The crews on the Flying Fortress told him that they saw the German aircraft climbing up to attack and their fighter escort which would be high cover, diving down to intercept the German aircraft, but just going straight past them and making a hole in the ground. What was going on? And of course, the answer was they were getting into compressibility trouble. So General Doolittle came to us and said, could we look into what was happening? We found that the German aircraft could fight up to a max number of point 75, three quarters of the speed of sun. They could actually manoeuvre at that speed. By contrast, the Lightning and Thunderbolt escorts could not operate beyond Mac .7 at high altitude. They were outclassed in combat, but by the grace of God, at this point, that appeared on the horizon, the Mustang, which was an American fighter that had been useless at high altitude until they replaced the Allison engine with the British Merlin engine. The Merlin, of course, is a high altitude engine, transformed it completely. And it could fly, actually combat fly at zero 78. So here we had the answer. So General Doolittle used nothing but mustangs for escort. This saved the United States bomber force, frankly, many years later, when I was made nonrefiller of the Society of Experimental Test, violets Doolittle was my host at that time and he said would I take back to farm by his everlasting thanks for the job we had done for him. As the war ended, Brown was appointed CEO of the captured enemy aircraft flight. In this role, he returned to Germany with three goals. One was to find its supersonic wind tunnels. Two, to locate its advanced aircraft and hopefully fly them. And three, interrogate Germany's leading aero engineers and pilots. The biggest surprise we had was the jets and the rocket aircraft were left totally untouched. Why? I've asked myself this many times, and I can only assume it was because they were so proud of their achievement that they wanted us to see this and see what might have been if they could have continued the war. Germany was divided into occupation zones. The main aviation research centres were in the British zone and the one at Falcon Roda had three supersonic wind tunnels. We were frankly shocked to find how far ahead of us they were. The Allies did not have one supersonic wind tunnel. Down in Bavaria, we were alerted that there was a wind tunnel there which had been originally in Peenemunde for Wernher von Braun. And this had an airstream of Mac 4.4. Quite incredible. And if I think things had gone on unabated a bit further, I do think Germany would have been the first to have broken the sound barrier. The awful reality of Nazi Germany was soon apparent. I liked the people. I had many good friends in Germany, but of course, I was rocked back on my heels and changed a lot of my opinion after what I saw in Belsen. In the background somewhere, a truce had been made with Germany about Belsen. In the camp we found 20,000 cases of typhus and I think the Germans were very frightened of this getting out into the population, which at that stage in the war would have been disastrous. So the deal was we could come in unopposed and we would take over and try to quell this typhus situation and the Germans would retreat back to their units to continue the fight against us. Strange arrangement, but that's how it was. And what we saw there indescribable. The piles of bodies were bad enough, but it was the stench of the place that I found so terrible. And, of course, we were a little worried about catching typhus. At Belsen, Brown was asked to interrogate the camp's boss and his mistress, Irma Grazer. She had been the female camp commandant, Auschwitz, and was, of course, well known there for her exceptional cruelty. She really was the worst human being I have ever met. When I interrogated her, she wouldn't reply. She just sat in a chair, wouldn't reply, then suddenly leapt to her feet, gave the Heil Hitler salute and called out, Heil Hitler, and then sat down and refused to answer anything. She was hung by Albert Pierpoint. Even when he put the bag over her head, she showed not a whittle of immersion. So these are the sorts of people one can find in a nation, I guess. The Luftwaffe jet aircraft were a revelation. Without any question, was the most formidable aircraft of World War II. For this reason, it had a lot of innovatory features and a quantum jump in performance. The innovatory features were, of course, primarily swept back wings. Secondly, axial flow jet engine. Thirdly very heavy firepower 430 millimetre cannon. It was the performance that rattled us, because at this time, the top Allied fighter was with Spitfire Mark 14, with a top speed of 446 miles an hour. When I tested the Me 262 at Farmborough, it had a top speed of 568 miles an hour. With this sort of fighter, you could conduct combat totally on your terms. If you didn't want to engage, you could go off and leave everybody standing. The 262 was powered by an axial flow turbojet, the UMO Four. It was a beautiful aeroplane to fly, but it had very, very sensitive jet engines. And when they were acting correctly, you had a great aeroplane on your hands. When they were temperamental, you had quite a difficult aeroplane on your hands. Brown himself captured an airfield stocked with another amazing German aircraft. Now, the Araldo two, three, four different propositions straight wing, same engines, but a reconnaissance bomber. But it was so fast, even with straight wings, that it could outrun any Allied fighter. And we know that it had taken Ricardon's pictures over Great Britain. Operating out of Norway, it was easier to keep serviceable than the Messerschmitt ME 262. I tended to fly the Araldo more because we were getting more information on the engine out of it. That's what we really wanted at that stage. And Brown was also the only Allied pilot to fly the most innovative Nazi aircraft of all, the Me 163. You had swept wings on this. It was semitailless. It had a rocket motor, which was unique in this sense. Rockets have been tried in aircraft for years. Here was a rocket produced which was throttleable. The one six three, in my opinion, at the end of the day, was a tool of desperation in its entire operational time. It killed 16 Allied aircraft for the loss of ten of its own. But the other side of the coin was they lost over 40 with operational accidents due to the high volatility of the fuels used. Its main fuel was concentrated hydrogen peroxide. Now, I know nothing more explosive. You had under full power, 120 seconds of flight. That was all. If you landed with as much as a cup full of fuel in the aircraft, the impact of touchdown would cause a violent explosion. Brown discovered the arms of the pilot's seat were in fact hydrogen peroxide fuel tanks. If a bullet goes through in fuel leaks, it would take nine minutes to melt the pilot. But strangely enough, at the end of the war, it was the aircraft that influenced world aviation. Thinking more than any other unit in Germany, brown was also busy interrogating the key players in Nazi aviation. In the whole of the American occupation zone. They had a single Araldo, two, three, four, and they were very keen to get one, so they were given two. Then they came back to us and said, the Secretary of State said we would very much like to have another two. And I hummed and hawed over this purely as a game and said we would like a quid pro quo. And they said, well, what are you after? And I said, interrogation rights with Göring. After a month, they agreed. I interrogated them. I think if I recollect, it was the 16 June 1945 and I was given an hour told I mustn't ask him any political questions because of the Nuremberg trials coming up. He was very affable and frankly, I found him a charismatic rogue. I asked him what he thought the outcome of the Battle of Britain was, to which he replied that it was a draw. And I said, well, how did you arrive at that conclusion? And he said, well, if you look at the official casualty lists on both sides, he said, There isn't much between them. Now, that's not an unreasonable statement when you look at the casualty list. And he said, secondly, we withdrew. We were not defeated. We withdrew because Hitler ordered all the air units back to train for Operation Barbarosa, which was the invasion of Russia. Now, that is also factually true. Now, I would not like to tell the RAF. By 1941, it had become clear that gas turbine jet propulsion was the future of flight. The aviation industry's next goal was to fly at supersonic speed. This was impossible on any piston engine aircraft because of the drag of the propeller. Farmborough had started and indeed was the first research establishment in the world to start work on compressibility and transonic testing. And it started using the Spitfire Five back in 1941. Its Boffins realised they had the key to supersonic flight, so they issued a specification in 1943 for a supersonic research aircraft and they chose Miles Aircraft to design with the help of Farmborough, the actual aircraft. This was designated the Miles M 52. One has to say they made a very good job of it. It had a special engine to be built by Frank Whittle, which was Turbine fan. With reheat, we believe we could reach 1000 miles an hour. And the aircraft had also a Biconvex wing, which was known as the Gillette Wing. And thirdly, it had a flying tail. This folds the tail plane and its elevator into one solid piece, which makes the aircraft more controllable as it nears supersonic speed. I think because of the impression that I made, or so I'm told, with getting the mozzie on the deck, they thought we'll use this guy in the high speed flight. In 144, Brown became the Navy's first pilot to fly a jet aeroplane. By contrast, no test pilot at Miles had yet flown one. I was chosen to be the pilot on it for the simple reason that the fuselage at the pilot position was only 4ft in diameter and you couldn't get a pilot in there whittle of more than 5ft eight. In December 1945, when the aircraft was 92% ready for first flight, there arose a great problem that Frank Whittle, who was then running power jets, fell out. With the establishment over the question of whether he or Rolls Royce should produce production jet engines, it was ruled that Rolls Royce should do it. He was so unhappy with this that he resigned from Par Jet. A month and a half later, the M 52 was cancelled. I had already been given the date for the first flight, which was to be October 1946. At bottomdown, there was no prior notification given either to Miles or to Farmborough. And I was hopping mad, frankly, when I heard the the decision. Nobody would tell Brown why the M 52 had been cancelled. About six months before the cancellation, the Ministry of Aircraft Production had ordered that we receive a visit from the Americans, that everything be shown to them, nothing to be withheld from them whatsoever. They were even to be given copies of all the reports and copies of the design work, etc. Without this visit, the Americans would not have advanced through the Sun Valley with the X One as early as they did. I think it was certainly well within our grasp and taken away, and this is the Galling thing for a reason that up to today we are not sure why it was done. Have you thought how your own life would have gone down a different avenue? Perhaps? Perhaps, yes. I wouldn't have relished it to the same degree, I don't think. While waiting to fly the M 52, brown had been working at Farnborough on another project that would further expand the military potential of jet aeroplanes. The then boss of the outfit said to me, you should be thinking of getting one of these onto carriers. Brown could choose from four aircraft. There was e 28 39. The Gloucester. This was ruled out because it was really an engine test bed. There was the Meteor, which was twin engine and really too big for the job. There was the Bell era Comet, the American one, and then they left us with the only other alternative, the De Havilland Spider Crab, which became the Vampire. And we selected that. The Vampire was a very, very docile aircraft, easy to fly and all handling characteristics very benign. The only problem we had was at that stage in jet development, the acceleration of the jet engine and the deceleration was very poor. What we wanted was flutter reaction. On a jet like you have on a piston engine, the task would require a whole new technique. The essence of deck landing is lift control, and you get that on a piston engine aircraft by throttle movement. If you want lift, you just push up the throttle, the airstrip will rev up and you get lift from the wash, from the propeller. If you want drag, what you do if you're getting too fast, you need drag, you just throttle back. In a jet, the only way you can get lift is by accelerating, getting more speed, and the only way you can get drag is from air brakes. So it's different technique altogether. Our big boost to all this was we were going to beat the Americans to it, which we did by nine months. On December 3, 1945, brown landed the vampire on HMS. Ocean. By marrying the reach of a carrier with the power of a jet aircraft, this pioneering flight would take naval warfare in a new direction. As Britain adjusted to post war life, brown pondered his future. During his fourth year at Farnborough, he had always been a reserve naval officer. Hawker were eager to hire him as a test pilot. I then approached the Navy and they said, Farmbrough says you can't be released. You're engaged in one of two top secret projects. And I said, well, you really are penalising me for this, aren't you? And they said, well, we will try and compensate you by offering you a permanent commission. And I said, Right, I'm prepared to accept that peace. And the gas turbine engine changed the focus of test flying. The emphasis, obviously, went on to civil aviation. We wanted a new breed of civil aircraft altogether. The first jet airliners were now well on the way. They had no option but to fly at high altitude. So penetration of Thunderclouds had to be looked at. But also a new phenomenon that was occurring up there called clear air turbulence. Here was a new environment for civilian passengers. The structural demands on a civil airline become huge. Someone had to find out more about them. One of the most uncomfortable tests I've ever made in my life is penetrating a Thunder head in a Spitfire. It is a frightening experience. You are tossed around like an ultra light toy and in addition, you're getting the full visual entertainment. Elmos fire around the prop, lightning strikes on the fuselage and lightning strikes that destroy your vision. You're at the mercy of the windshields occurring in those Thunderheads and sometimes you find yourself going up at a rate of 1000ft a minute, and a couple of seconds later you'll be going down at a similar rate. Eric Brown's exploit in test flying took him to Buckingham Palace to receive further decorations. But the happiest occasion came in 1948 when his wife Lynn gave birth to a son. By now, years of working at Farnborough had shown the fragility of life as a test pilot. After a while, you realise if you're going to stay in the job any length of time, you better think about survivability. And the fatality rate at Farmborough amongst test pilots in aerodynamics flight was very high. 25% wartime pressure for quick results had been a major cause of fatalities. We were jumping from one aircraft, one type of aircraft to another. I've done as many as eight different types in one day, so preparation is vital. That requires time and a lot of the pilots prefer to use their time drinking at the bar. They were familiar with the aircraft when everything was normal, but when an emergency occurred, they hadn't boned up on what to do in these emergencies. Now, I always carried a knee pad with me. I wanted to take test results, but on the other knee I had a pad with the emergency drill. I think preparation contributed a large percentage to my survival. But another thing is I think my stature contributed to my survival because it's very noticeable that very tall people in aeroplanes run into a lot of bigger troubles than small pilots. In 1949, Brown again cheated death when a jet powered flying boat that he was landing in the Solent hit a floating mast that had broken off a yacht. After six years of test flying at Farmborough and the Lordships of the Admiralty decided I'd better go back to operational flying, brown rejoined his old squadron, 802. As senior pilot, I found it very easy to integrate. I mean, the flying was much simpler, but what I enjoyed tremendously was the camaraderie of squadron life. We were in the Mediterranean at that time and flying from what I call a fleet carrier, wasn't a full size carrier. And sea furious. You forget that naval flying is very different from Air Force flying. You're in an environment which is basically hostile, sea flying single engine aircraft too. Everything happens. A ditching is inevitable. That is not a needy thing to do, particularly if the sea is rough. So the Air Force fighter pilot goes out, has his combat, comes back to his airfield. In the Navy, you have your combat and then you've got to find your way home, because unlike fighting over land, you are not allowed to contact your carrier in case you give its position away. Sometimes after combat, you're quite disorientated and then when you get back, you have the hazard of deck landing. But on the nice side, I was fortunate enough to lead the Navy's piston engineer batting team to give air choice when we got back to UK. Brown's. Next posting took him to the United States Navy. After leaving Farmborough, the Americans had asked if I could go to America to their test centre, Patuxent River. The Brown family crossed the Atlantic the traditional way and took up residence at the US Naval Air Test Centre in Maryland. Here he was able to fly the F 86 Sabre, then proving itself in Korea and complete some unfinished business. The F 86 was one of the most delightful jets. In fact, I counted it as the most delightful to handle because it had almost perfect harmony of control. Now, harmony of control is what binds a pilot with these aircraft. You and the aeroplane are one, you're part of it. And the Sabre has absolutely and also I have a great affection for it because it was the first aircraft on which I ever went supersonic. I'd done so much transonic flying that when I actually took the F-86 through the barrier, it really did exactly what I thought would happen. The only surprise was because one hadn't experienced it before, was when you got through the barrier, everything suddenly became dead smooth and all this vibration and porpoising and nose down trim, the fate all disappeared and you were in smooth air. The Royal Navy wanted all career officers who were pilots to learn how to take control of the vessel. On return to Britain, Brown was posted to HMS Rocket, an antisubmarine frigate based at Londonderry, to serve as one of the ship's offices. At the end of 1953, he returned to Scotland to command 804 Squadron at Lossiemouth, flying Hawker Seahawks. He was also promoted to commander and the next year, the Browns moved to Wales, where Eric became air commander at Brody Station in Pembrokeshire. Brody was in the depth of Wales and of course, it was fairly isolated part of the country and subject to very nasty weather. It was coastal and we were on the top of a fairly high cliff, a difficult place to operate on and to this day, the centre of a mystery. Air traffic control alerted me that aircraft were reporting seeing a flying saucer and when one looked up anywhere on the air fuel. It was clear to the naked eye there was something like it and I sauce it up there. So I said, Right, I'll take a vampire up and have a look at it, and went up to the absolute ultimate ceiling of the vampire, which was just almost 40,000ft, and it was still above me. I didn't get close enough to put my hand on my heart and say what it was. Anyway, we recorded it, but I have an open mind on flying saucers. In 1958, Brown's work once again took him back to Germany as chief of the British Naval Mission in Keel. I went really to build up the German naval air arm. Gerding had insisted that everything that flies comes under his control at the end of the war. They were left hindrive, of course, and as an effort to get them back into business, they appealed to NATO that if they could reform a German naval alarm, they would be happy to assign it to NATO. So my job was to take World War II pilots together with an intake of the new generation of post war pilots and meld them all together into a force that we could assign to NATO. Brown achieved this demanding task. The end of the day, they were a very good fighting force and I was very proud to hand them over to NATO. The naval pilots had used British Seahawks as their jet trainers. When we finished, I had recommended to them that they continue thereafter with Buccaneers. But the German manufacturers ganged up on the German services and insisted on having the F 104 Starfighter. The reason for this was the German industry realised they had been out of the game and they wanted to get back into the Mac one, the Supersonic League, in one jump. Now, the services weren't happy with this. The German services would receive an all purpose starfighter that weighed 1000 kilogrammes more than those in the USA. Also, the Americans realised this was a tricky ship to fly and they wouldn't let anybody touch it. With less than 1500 hours, the Germans were sending pilots in. With 400 hours, almost 150 crashed, of which 50% the crashes were fatal. Disaster in every sense of the what. How did you find the star fighter to fly? Oh, it was very tricky. You had a view with Sambaju. It was tricky and bad weather, but if you had an emergency and bad weather on your hands, you really needed a Cracker Jack pilot there to deal with it. Working in Germany, Brown saw how the past could return to haunt the present. Dennis had come out of his ten years in prison. A submarine up at Kil, where we were based, had died, so there was to be a big funeral for him and the naval alarm were going to turn out. Back in Whitehall, it was felt diplomatic for Brown to attend. Dennett went to the funeral and afterwards he came along and shook hands with every chapter. He'd gone free past me and he realised I wasn't in German uniform. So he came back and he said, You're British, aren't you? And I said yes. He said, what are you doing here? And I said, Well, I'm training in the Naval Air Arm and we've all come to pay our respects to a war hero. And he said, oh, that's very kind, thank you very much, and just went on. But when he got to the end of the line and forced stepping into his car, they all broke ranks and rushed over to surround him. However, they knew they could not cheer a Nazi leader. They all took their hats off, as they do for the normal three years, and did this three times, but in complete silence. It's quite eerie. Towards the end of his time in Germany, eric Brown was promoted to the rank of captain. When I returned from my posting in Germany to the Admiralty, I at first was made Deputy Director of the Gunnery Division. I had a year of that, which was enough, and then became the Deputy Director of Air Warfare. Now, this was a very interesting period because we were proposing to have a real, if you like, spring cleaning of the Fleet Air Arm. We were proposing a new carrier and we wanted new aircraft. There was a tendency in the Minister of Defence at this time to ask both the Air Force and ourselves to use the same aircraft. They were trying hard to push onto us a veto version P 1154, an increased size harrier. Really, to me, not a very impressive performance. We still had the Arc Royal, the Hermes and the Eagle, so we were still in the big carrier game and I was quite determined I was not going to have vital. I wanted to have the fastest performance aircraft we could have. And looming on the horizon at that time was this wonderful aircraft, the McDonald Phantom, twin engines, which is another good thing to have in naval aviation if you're spending your time over the lonely sea. And tremendous performance, but above all, tremendous weapon carrying ability. In its day, it was head and shoulders above anything that was around. Brown pushed hard for the Phantom in Whitehall. The chief scientist at that time supported me and this was, I think, what tipped the scales, really, when we actually got it. It was everything I'd hoped for. I flew it in America, I flew it here, I flew it onto an American carrier and it was superb. What's it like to land one on a carrier the first time? Fast, of course, but very easy to control. Very easy. Apart from the high landing speeds, which means you have to think a little bit faster. The Navy would be able to use the Phantoms for barely ten years and only on one carrier. Just before the Falklands crisis arose, the Ark Royal was scrapped, the Phantom brought ourselves. We were left, therefore, with the Harrier as our main strike aircraft. The carrier, for safety reasons, had to stand 70 miles off the Falkland Islands. This restricted the harriers capability. By the time it's got the 70 miles done, half an hour over the Falkland, circling around, waiting for Argentina aircraft to come, then 70 miles back again. It is almost out of fuel. If we'd had the Phantom, it would have gone halfway to Argentina to kill the aircraft coming out to raid the Falklands on route. And I spoke to the commander of the Falklands campaign afterwards and he felt that if he had had Phantoms, this battle could have been won in probably a fortnight or a month. You're flying the Phantom just 25 years after flying a gladiator. Do you ever think about that? Nothing accelerates technology, of course, like a war. And we entered it, as you so rightly say, largely a biplane air force, and emerged from it as a monoplane air force with a considerable improvement in performance. It is incredible the progress that was made because of the pressure of war. And, of course, fortunately, that was the genius acquittal arriving on the scene and coming at absolutely the right time to transform us from the piston engineer into the jet era. Without war, to achieve what we did would probably have taken maybe 20 years. Stead compressed into five years. 25 years after the British authorities had sent Brown to teach in Germany, he finally went there as a diplomat. In November 1964, he became the naval attachet at the Bond Embassy. That was a very interesting visit because it was a time of the state visit of the Queen, our first to Germany. The enthusiasm for her was incredible. Right along the line they had painted on the banks of the line, welcome to our quid. It gave me a chance to meet some of the new heads of state, for example, the new president, Earhart, who was the Chancellor one, really got into the inner circle there and I think they were genuinely working for a new Germany. Not many of them knew my background. They really didn't connect. I didn't talk about it much and I didn't think it was the right thing to do in diplomatic circles, because inevitably, they do not like to hear talk about the SS. But what said, if we had known then what we know now, we would certainly have not allowed you and your car out of Germany. In 1967, Brown returned to lossy mouth, this time as commander of its naval air station. Two years later, he was made a naval aide de comp to the Queen. He retired from the Royal Navy in 170 and went to work in the aviation industry. Captain Eric Brown is regarded as the leading aviator from the great age of test flying. His work was crucial to Britain's defence. Yet this era has a wider legacy still. It paved the way to the safe flying that we now take for granted every day in thousands of airlines. What do you think is it that makes a good pilot? Well, what a good question to begin with, motivation obviously, is the first. If you're not motivated you're never going to want to fly. Secondly, you have got to believe that you're doing something that is going to take your full interest. You're not doing it because it's fashionable or because you think, oh, this is a good sideline to have with the girls or anything like that. The only way you take it further is either you go into civil aviation as an airline pilot or you go into the services and then you're going to have to step up another gear and that means you've got to improve your skills, particularly in blind flying. And that is usually a hurdle that brings a lot down in more time. What is it that separates the good combat pilot from the bad? Oh, well, I think most of the really brilliant combat pilots were good shots. It was a hobby of theirs. For example, Johnny Johnson on our side was a very good shot. Galand and Bobby Hartman were both great shots with rifles. Every fighter pilot goes through that's unless she's been a good shot. There comes a period just after you've qualified where your camera gun shots show that you're not going to hit anything and suddenly when you're feeling pretty desperate about getting a hang of it all, it clicks. Is there a psychological motivation? I think so, to a large degree, yes. An analyst in 1980 something or other looked at my career and said I had eleven death threatening accidents, so to survive those I can't complain.
