G-TALY & DoW's Pilot
Just stumbled across this forum by accident and spotted this thread with interest. My father is Ken Davies, the former pilot of the Duke of Westminster and one-time pilot of G-TALY. Now retired (but still flying) he was actually employed as a Mechanic and not a Gardener and consequently flew as a private pilot and not as a commercial one. He was originally employed as a mechanic for real. The present Duke's father gave him permission to fly his own light aircraft from a disused airfield on the Eaton Estate and later asked him if he would fly a plane for him if he bought one. The rest is history. I will check with my Dad the next time I see him and get him reading this forum but in the meantime to the best of my recollection the sequence of aircraft (FW & RW) was:-
Piper Cherokee
Piper Apache
Piper Aztec
Enstrom Shark
Bell Jet Ranger (I seem to recall that there may have been 2 of them one after the other with G-TALY being the first)
Twin Squirrel
Hawker Siddley HS125
Cessna Citation (again, I think there were 2 of them)
and that's about when he retired so I'm not sure what came next!
I grew up around the planes and the hangar (where my Dad also kept his own light aircraft of various sorts over the years) so remember them all to varying degrees!
I hope that has refreshed/updated a few memories for a few other people!