One of the many 'sidelights' to this story is that I used to have a good friend in San Francisco - Roger Sherron. He was a retired Pan Am Captain, and fellow member of the deHavilland Moth Club. I used to visit him back in the eighties and fly with him at weekends when working in San Fran, and I bought my second Tiger Moth from him. But I digress.
Roger was a true Anglophile and bought a cottage in Godstone where he stayed every summer so he could instruct at the Tiger Club at nearby Redhill. In his long career with Pan Am, he had started flying the Boeing Clippers from SFO (Treasure Island) to Hawaii and so was an avid seaplane pilot and instructor. The Tiger Club at that time operated a Tiger on floats (G-AIVW) from the gravel pits out on Dungeness Point in Kent - so Roger was their main Sea Tiger instructor every summer for many years - until some idiot threw it into the sea and it was no more.
I'm digressing again. Anyway, it turned out that while I was trying to trace Olive Willatts, I discovered that she had owned the cottage directly next door to Roger in Godstone! Roger and his wife were still in annual Christmas card contact with Olive down in Devon, so it took someone in San Francisco to track her down in deepest Devon!
Here's Roger in Flight Magazine (in one of Roger Bacon's wonderful columns) back in 1970 with two of his aircraft ...
http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/ ... 01116.html
Roger obtained his pilots license in 1937. He was in part inspired by the Lindbergh transatlantic flight of 1927, and in fact he did, on one occasion, have the chance to fly a 'plane with Lindbergh on board.
Roger's first job in aviation at the age of 11 was cleaning bird droppings off the wings of aeroplanes. He then sold rides on the plane his boss flew around the Chapel Hill, North Carolina area. They would land on a farmers' dirt strips and offer 10-12 minutes rides for $1.00 per person, two people at a time in a 90 horse power plane with a water cooled engine.
Years later he got into the communications department of Pan Am, as a result of his experience with ham radios and general radio operations. He worked on the Boeing 314's (Clipper flying boats) as a radio operator. He said this 'plane was the finest he ever flew. He was a radio operator on flights from New York to Bermuda. After getting his commercial license Pan Am hired him, where he flew a four continent route to make one crossing from Lisbon back to the U.S.
Roger flew DC-3's from Miami to Buenos Aires, and flew other planes during his career including the DC-4, Convair 240, DC-6, 707 and finally the 747. In 1967 he bought a Tiger Moth in England (built in 1942, by Morris Motors, of course) and had the parts flown to Sonoma County Airport near Santa Rosa in northern California where he re-assembled it. Roger was automatically retired at age 60 in 1976.
In 1987 he flew his Tiger Moth between the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge during the 50th anniversary celebration of the Golden Gate Bridge and landed at Crissey Field in downtown San Francisco. That day, about fifty vintage aircraft assembled for multiple fly-bys of the bridge and I was fortunate enough to fly many bridge 'sorties' that day in a wide variety of interesting aircraft, including one Aeronca Chief where we removed a birds nest from where the struts went into the wing before taking off!
Happy days.
