Originally Posted by
MrBernoulli
I enjoyed Brown's book immensely, but wished it had been longer, as I am sure there were more interesting tales to tell.
It appears those tales, or at least
some of them, are probably available to read now, in a new book about Winkle Brown.
Winkle: The Extraordinary Life of Britain’s Greatest Pilot by Paul Beaver (published June 2023)
"Now, drawing on previously unseen documents and unfettered access to Winkle's own personal archive, Paul Beaver uncovers the complex and enigmatic man behind the legend - the real story of Britain's greatest pilot.
A story Winkle insisted could only be told after his death . . ."
Ah...Winkle! One of my favorite all time people.
Some years ago I was working with long time friend Gen Des Barker of the SAAF on two books, "Zero Error Margin" and "Anatomy of Airshow Accidents".
Back engineering one of the accidents involved in our research involving prop overspeed in a dive I ended up becoming friends with Winkle.
What a wonderful guy he was. It was 2009. Eric at that time was 90 years old. I can tell you talking with him revealed in a heartbeat he was sharp as a tack and still smart as a whip. We became friends and I simply loved the guy.
What a history he had. I had flown 72 different types. Winkle just laughed. He lost count of the types he had flown. :-)))
Over time we really got into some of the testing he and others had done at Farnborough, especially the high mach number dive testing they did in Spits.
I knew that Herb Fisher here in the states had done high speed dive testing in modified P47's and Eric was aware of that.
Naturally I was interested in just how far they got into the transonic region with the Spits as I saw no way in hell you could get into the 0.90 region with a prop fighter as had been postulated by some here in the states. Eric agreed. He had gotten into high mach areas with a Spit but the prop was of course always the issue. They tried everything they could think of to get into higher mach numbers. They tried special props and different propeller settings and dive entries. Naturally nothing worked. This is why no prop fighter has ever broken the sound barrier.
It was interesting about the incident that Eric told me was in his opinion the absolute fastest dive ever done in a prop fighter.
It was done on the 27th of April 1944 when Squadron Leader Martindale who was at the time heading up the high speed flight test program took a Spit X1 from 40K out to mach .92. On trying to recover at 28K the overspeeding Rotol propeller departed the aircraft taking the reduction gear with it. The Spit took +11g's and when Martindale recovered consciousness he was back up at 40K. He managed to get the gear down using the emergency system and landed without further incident. This incident and the speed achieved that day by Martindale remains the fastest speed in a dive ever achieved by a propeller driven airplane.
Winkle told me they never achieved a speed over .88 without a prop over speed.
This is just a sample of Eric's life and work environment. I considered Winkle one of the finest pilots of any nation of all time, a great guy, and a wonderful friend.
Dudley Henriques