Ian Morrison
Aviation expert Born: July 28, 1924 Died: December 31, 2015
IAN Morrison, who has died aged 91, worked in civil aviation and was heavily involved in the development of Prestwick Airport from a wartime base to a major international airport in the 1960s.
His interest in aviation started at an early age, and he enlisted in the RAF the day he turned 18 in 1942.
He was called up in March 1943 and had hoped to become a pilot but was declined due to a slight eye defect.
Later that month he was posted to Torquay for initial training, drill, fitness and basic navigation, subsequently to Heaton Park, Manchester, and then travelled to Greenock to board the liner Ile de France to New York.
From New Brunswick he had a threeday train journey to his posting in Mossbank near Mo o s eja w in the Saskatchewan prairies where he trained as a bomb aimer.
From there he was posted to the Air Observers’ School at Winnipeg where he was trained in navigation and was awarded his wings.
En route home in late 1944, he visited New York and heard Frank Sinatra sing on Broadway. He sailed on the Mauritania from Halifax to Liverpool and arrived there on Christmas Day.
He was then posted to an advanced flying unit at Bishops Court, Northern Ireland for training on Mark 5 Ansons, then to the Operational Training Unit, Lichfield to train on Mark 10 Wellingtons. He recalled being in a bar with 30 pilots, thirty navigators and thirty bomb aimers where they were all instructed to form three-man crews. His new crew mates were a pilot from Australia and a navigator from Glasgow but they never saw active service; the day after they completed their training, the war was declared over.
In January 1946, he was posted to Cairo for a year where he worked in air movements, drawing up flights plans and being responsible for meeting incoming aircraft and deciding how much cargo, mail or passenger load they could carry on their journeys east.
His number came up in December 1946. He sailed from Port Said to Marseilles, took a train to Dunkirk, thence to Kirkham, Lancashire where he was given a suit, a pair of shoes, socks, shirt, tie and hat, and told, “Off you go”.
He went to Glasgow to resume a job he had had before the war in Ainslie’s distillers’ office, but a few weeks there were enough to confirm that his heart lay in aviation and he joined BEA at Prestwick airport in April 1947. On 1st January, 1948, all BEA employees were transferred to BOAC, British Overseas Airways Corporation.
His first task was to meet a Liberator arriving from Canada whose pilot was the well known Senior BOAC Captain OP Jones whose flying companion, a pet labrador, he then had to walk round the airfield. Most of the pilots were former RAF and the ground crew were obliged to stand to attention and salute the captain on arrival and departure.
Another famous former RAF pilot flying through Prestwick was Captain Terry Bulloch, a highly decorated war hero, who had been responsible for sinking four German U boats.
The aircraft, for example Constellations and Stratocruisers, found it difficult to cross the Atlantic because their flying height of 10,000 coincided with the prevailing weather patterns. The routes were usually via Keflavik in Iceland, to Gander or Bluie West in Newfoundland or Goose Bay in Labrador, and then to Montreal or New York.
On one occasion an 049 Constellation flown by ex-RAF Captain Eagleton, sporting his flying helmet and cotton wool in his ears, left Prestwick for Keflavik but was unable to land due to adverse weather. Captain Eagleton and his passengers arrived back in Prestwick seven hours later.
Mr Morrison was in the process of arranging accommodation for the no doubt exhausted passengers and crew when the captain announced that he wanted to make a second attempt via Shannon, Santa Maria in the Azores and Bermuda to New York. Captains were autonomous, so they set off and arrived in New York a mere 30 hours after their initial departure.
He was involved with a very sad event on Christmas Day, 1954 when a Stratocruiser crashed on Prestwick runway with substantial loss of life.
Other events were happier. He once had the onerous task of having to waken Elizabeth Taylor to make sure she disembarked to go through customs but he was off duty when Elvis Presley took his only steps on British soil.
During his career he met and looked after a host of eminent people in the world of business, politics and entertainment, including Henry Ford, the Duke of Argyll, Harold Wilson, Alec Douglas Hume, Burt Lancaster, George C Scott, Morecambe and Wise (en route to try to make it in the United States) and Bing Crosby.
In 1959, he was promoted from duty officer to senior station officer then, in 1963, to BOAC airport manager. He was heavily involved with the development of the new Prestwick airport, which became BOAC’s second largest station after Heathrow when it opened in 1964. He was well regarded by senior management for the way he had built up his team and developed excellent business relationships, to the great benefit of BOAC.
He was asked to undertake various trips round the world advising BOAC stations on improving their performance, investigating cooperation between ground crews and air crews, and checking on documentation work and catering at the stations. He was awarded the MBE in 1969 for services to civil aviation.
In 1975 he flew on Concorde to Washington. He commented: “I’ll never forget it. Where in the world can you see the sun rise in the west? Only on Concorde at 50,000ft”.
In the same year, he was promoted to district manager for British Airways, created after a merger of BOAC and BEA in 1974, and he retired on 31st March, 1980.
He was brought up in Riddrie; his father had been in the Royal Scots Guards in the First World War. Aged 16 and then the office teaboy, he met his future wife, Kath Wylie, aged 20 and a secretary, in 1940 in Ainslie’s. They married in Cairns Church, Milngavie in 1947 and their honeymoon began on a flight to London on a Viking aircraft which was a converted Wellington bomber.
He and his wife were together for 66 years until Kath died in May, 2014.
After his family and aviation, golf was his great love, and he played regularly (and well) at Turnberry for 50 years only ceasing to play in the last three years of his life. Frank Sinatra’s Come Fly With Me was played at his funeral.
He was a wonderful father of Lesley and Wynne, grandfather of seven and great grandfather of three and passed on to his family a curiosity about the world and the people in it.