It is a strangeness in my life that I don’t make many friends and don’t remember names so I was thinking, as I read this fine thread, that I didn’t really know anyone who fit the bill. As I read on one or two came to mind and I realised, for the very few friends I have, that even one or two are really too many.
There was my stepfather. My father was killed in a Typhoon near the end of the war. My mother married a test pilot. He took me up in an Auster when I was about four. He had survived Malta and bailing out. He was later killed in a rather unpleasant and unnecessary accident.
Not my friends but: I was at boarding school age about seven or eight. Early post war. One day a couple of ex students from before the war came to visit the headmistress, landed their Auster on the playing fields. After they left they crashed in the woods just a few hundred yards from the school. Some time later we were on a class nature walk and were rather carelessly taken past the crash site. I distinctly remember my intense curiosity and how some of the remaining small bits looked. The event left an impression on us all as though we had known the victims but I didn’t feel much about it till I was in my fifties and something brought it back to mind.
There was an airline pilot, D. I met who came with a friend to Sun and Fun the year I went. Go getter. Died from suspected fuel starvation leaving an airshow for home.
B. Lovely guy. Gave a friend a ride on the friend’s daughter’s wedding day. Spun into the water from maybe three hundred feet. Both lost.
R. Owner and Chief instructor for a gliding club. Just a bit too “We’re gliders, everyone must give way to us,” for me. Lost is a motor glider in a mid-air in a valley passage between the airfield and a local village.