Pilot flies closer to 100
For as long as he could remember, Ralph Brown always had a fascination with flying.
Born in 1919 in Oamaru, Brown is one of the few surviving Spitfire pilots left from World War II.
The former Flight Lieutenant celebrated his 99th birthday yesterday with family and friends at the Ernest Rutherford Retirement Village in Nelson, and reminisced a little about his time flying one of the Royal Air Force’s most feared planes.
‘‘The Spitfire was a beautiful plane to fly, they were lovely’’, Brown said.
‘‘It would do as you told it to. If you wanted to go up, you would go up, and if you wanted to go down, it would go down.’’
During the 1940s the Supermarine Spitfire was one of the fastest planes in the world, with the Mark IX models that Brown flew reaching a top speed of more than 650kmh.
‘‘The difference between a Spitfire and an ordinary plane, was the Spitfire was so fast.
‘‘You had to become accustomed to it, and allow for how fast you could land it, if you ever got round to it.’’
Brown volunteered to fly for the Royal Air Force in the early years of the war, training on Tiger Moths at Taieri Airport in Dunedin.
‘‘We’d play around, we used to have great competitions where we’d find a barbed-wire fence and then see who could [fly] the closest to it.’’
In 1942, at the age of 24, Brown was sent to Canada where he earned his wings.
Initially posted to the Royal Navy in Britain, Brown ended up in the Royal Air Force’s Mysore Squadron where he escorted bombers from England into war zones in Europe.
The Mysore Squadron, funded by the Maharaja of Mysore, comprised pilots from each Allied country contributing to the war.
One of the operations Brown was involved in was as a bomber escort, flying a Mustang in the bombing of the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen, Denmark, on March 21 1945 (also known as ‘‘Operation Carthage’’).
After the war Brown married, had two daughters and worked as a podiatrist in Dunedin.
His wife died a number of years ago but his children were in Nelson to help him celebrate his birthday.