About Me

I served four years in Glasgow University, but on release there were few jobs for a chap with a B.Sc. in Aeronautical Engineering, but that was Plan B anyway, so I reverted to Plan A.
I had long cherished a job as an airline pilot. My father worked as a design engineer in a small company in the aviation industry, making parts for civil and military aircraft. In that role he helped answer the technical questions on the company’s stand at the Farnborough and Paris Air Shows in the nineteen fifties and sixties when I was growing up. Thus aviation was in the blood, and holidays in the Alps in 1956, 1959 and 1962 gave me the taste for romantic air travel, with its characteristic smell of burnt kerosene.

In my final year at University I applied to the College of Air Training run by the State airlines BEA and BOAC, and was finally accepted. It’s all in ‘The Book’. With a job and a house I could afford to return to my boyhood interest in model aeroplanes, but now using radio control. As an airline pilot I spent time on standby, and that’s when I started writing my first book. Hand writing was terrible, and gave me a huge respect for writers in the era of sharpened feathers, but years later a friend introduced me to word processing on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum+. Magic! Hence the first book. (see BOOKS)

I took it to one publisher (sorry, we’ve got one) then another, with my idea for a book plus a linked column in their monthly model magazine, and they took it on. I started taking my early IBM laptop with me on longhaul trips where I sat in nice hotels writing columns for the model magazines. In my Aerodynamic Forum column in R/C Model World I answered questions from readers, drawing on my experience of model flying, full size flying and of course the theory from University.
I expanded the writing to include reports and photographs from flying events both in Britain and abroad (Florida sunshine mostly) including flights in a Cub floatplane and SNJ6 (Harvard trainer from WW2). When the editor switched to another magazine, Aviation Modeller International, he invited me to contribute material there as well and that led to another monthly column that alternated between waterplanes that took off from water, and turbine powered jets.

I retired from Airline flying when I had to (aged 55 at that time) and from writing when it became a chore rather than a joy in about 2012. I still have some articles that may be of interest to model aircraft enthusiasts, some experiments that I conducted, some useful hints and tips and tools that I use, and some of my designs that may interest or inspire other modellers. I will try to put them up on the website from time to time.