After 50 years with the RAF, Pete may be country’s oldest military engineer
A GRANDFATHER of three, who left school at 15-and-a-half to join the RAF, has become one of Britain’s longest-serving military engineers.
Pete Dunning, 65, followed in his father’s footsteps 50 years ago, and after putting in service around the world, returned in 2008 to the Shropshire air base where his career began.
“I had never given it a thought that I had been working for 50 years until the station told me,” he said. “I’ll carry on for as long as I’m useful and healthy.”
Mr Dunning, who rose to the rank of Warrant Officer, has seen the air force shrink to a fifth of its size of half a century ago.
“I didn’t do exams at school – you could leave if you joined the military,” he said.
“When I joined, the Cold War was the big thing – the big bogeyman in the distance. When that finished, everything changed. The military changed massively.”
At his present base, RAF Cosford, he said, “there were 2,000 apprentices alone”.
He added: “I have been lucky – I haven’t lost any friends to conflict.
“In the first Gulf War, there was a pilot who gave me a letter and said, ‘If I don’t come back, give this to my wife’.
“Luckily I gave it back to him three weeks later.
“But I have lost friends in aircraft accidents. One flew into a mountain in Scotland.”