Was he the best test pilot in history? Eric "Winkle" Brown flew 487 Different Aircraft. Eric Brown is also the pilot who interrogated Hermann Göring in exchange for an aircraft.
Listen to his incredible life story.
Captain Eric Melrose "Winkle" Brown, CBE, DSC, AFC, Hon FRAeS, RN (21 January 1919 - 21 February 2016) was a British Royal Navy officer and test pilot who flew 487 types of aircraft, more than anyone else in history.
Brown holds the world record for the most aircraft carrier deck take-offs and landings performed (2,407 and 2,271 respectively) and achieved several "firsts" in naval aviation, including the first landings on an aircraft carrier of a twin-engined aircraft, an aircraft with a tricycle undercarriage, a jet aircraft, and a rotary-wing aircraft.
He flew almost every category of Royal Navy and Royal Air Force aircraft: glider, fighter, bomber, airliner, amphibian, flying boat, and helicopter. During World War II, he flew many types of captured German, Italian, and Japanese aircraft, including new jet and rocket aircraft. He was a pioneer of jet technology in the postwar era.
Brown was born in Leith, near Edinburgh, in the United Kingdom. His father was a former balloon observer and pilot in the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and Brown first flew when he was eight or ten when he was taken up in a Gloster Gauntlet by his father, the younger Brown sitting on his father's knee.
In 1936 Brown's father took him to see the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Hermann Göring had recently announced the existence of the Luftwaffe, and Brown and his father met and were invited to join social gatherings by members of the newly disclosed organization. At one of these meetings, Ernst Udet, a former World War I fighter ace, was fascinated to make the acquaintance of Brown senior, a former RFC pilot, and offered to take his son Eric up flying with him. Eric eagerly accepted the German's offer and after his arrival at the appointed airfield at Halle, he was soon flying in a two-seat Bücker Jungmann. He recalled the incident nearly 80 years later on the BBC radio program Desert Island Discs
You talk about aerobatics - we did every one I think and I was hanging on to my tummy. So, when we landed, and he gave me the fright of my life because we approached upside-down and then he rolled out just in time to land, he said to me as I got out of the cockpit, slapped me between the shoulder-blades, and gave me the old WW1 fighter pilots' greeting, Hals- und Beinbruch, which means broken neck and broken legs but that was their greeting. But he said to me, you'll make a fine fighter pilot - do me two favors: learn to speak German fluently and learn to fly.
During the Olympic Games Brown witnessed Hitler shaking hands with Jesse Owens.
In 1937, Brown left the Royal High School and entered the University of Edinburgh, studying modern languages with an emphasis on German. While there he joined the university's air unit and received his first formal flying instruction. In February 1938 he returned to Germany under the sponsorship of the Foreign Office, having been invited to attend the 1938 Automobile Exhibition by Udet, by then a Luftwaffe major general. He saw the demonstration of the Focke-Wulf Fw 61 helicopter flown by Hanna Reitsch before a small crowd inside the Deutschlandhalle. During this visit, he met and got to know Reitsch, whom he had also briefly met in 1936.
On returning to the United Kingdom then at war, he joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve before subsequently joining the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve as a Fleet Air Arm pilot, where he was posted to 802 Naval Air Squadron, initially serving on the first escort carrier, HMS Audacity, converted and thus named in July 1941. He flew one of the carrier's Grumman Martlets. During his service on board Audacity, he shot down two Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor maritime patrol aircraft, using head-on attacks to exploit the blind spot in their defensive armament.
Audacity was torpedoed and sunk on 21 December 1941 by the German submarine U-751, commanded by Gerhard Bigalk. The first rescue ship left because of warnings of a nearby U-boat, and Brown was left in the sea overnight with a dwindling band of survivors until he was rescued the next day.He was one of two of the 24 to survive the hypothermia; the rest succumbed to the cold. Of the complement of 480, 407 survived,
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19 дек 2022
