Record-setting UK pilot Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown dies at 97

london — Eric “Winkle” Brown, a British pilot who flew more kinds of aircraft than anyone in history and was the first person to land a jet on an aircraft carrier, has died. He was 97.

Brown’s family said he died on Sunday at a hospital in southern England after a short illness.

Often dubbed Britain’s greatest pilot, Brown holds the world record for the most types of aircraft flown — 487 — and for the most carrier deck landings, at 2,407.

Nicknamed Winkle — short for periwinkle — because of his relatively short 5 foot 7 inch (1.7 metre) height, Edinburgh-born Brown was a soft-spoken man who described himself as “a strange mixture of an academic and a cowboy.” His daring extended beyond the cockpit; in his youth he took a job as a circus Wall of Death rider, doing circuits on a motorcycle with a lion in the sidecar.

He flew fighter planes with the Fleet Air Arm during World War II, surviving the 1941 torpedoing of the ship he was based on as fighter protection for North Atlantic convoys.

He was present at the April 1945 liberation of the BergenBelsen camp, and at war’s end was tasked with flying planes captured from the Germans. The job included flying a rocket-powered Messerschmitt Me 163B-1a Komet — an experience Brown recalled last year was “like being in charge of a runaway train.”—