However, after three days' incarceration, they merely escorted Brown in his MG Magnette sports car to the Swiss border, saying they were allowing him to keep the car because they "had no spares for it".
Soon afterwards, Brown was arrested by the SS. Upon opening the door he was met by a woman with the announcement that " our countries are at war". In the meantime, Brown had been selected to take part as an exchange student at the Schule Schloss Salem, located on the banks of Lake Constance, and it was while there in Germany that Brown was woken up with a loud knocking on his door one morning in September 1939. During this visit he met and got to know Reitsch, whom he had also briefly met in 1936. He there saw the demonstration of the Focke-Wulf Fw 61 helicopter flown by Hanna Reitsch before a small crowd inside the Deutschlandhalle. In February 1938 he returned to Germany under the sponsorship of the Foreign Office, having been invited to attend the 1938 Automobile Exhibition by Udet, by then a Luftwaffe major general. While there he joined the university's air unit and received his first formal flying instruction. In 1937, Brown left the Royal High School and entered the University of Edinburgh, studying modern languages with an emphasis on German. But he said to me, you'll make a fine fighter pilot – do me two favours: learn to speak German fluently and learn to fly.ĭuring the Olympic Games Brown witnessed Hitler shaking hands with Jesse Owens. So, when we landed, and he gave me the fright of my life because we approached upside-down and then he rolled out just in time to land, he said to me as I got out of the cockpit, slapped me between the shoulder-blades, and gave me the old WW1 fighter pilots' greeting, Hals- und Beinbruch, which means broken neck and broken legs but that was their greeting. You talk about aerobatics – we did every one I think and I was hanging on to my tummy. He recalled the incident nearly 80 years later on the BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs, Eric eagerly accepted the German's offer and after his arrival at the appointed airfield at Halle, he was soon flying in a two-seat Bücker Jungmann. At one of these meetings, Ernst Udet, a former World War I fighter ace, was fascinated to make the acquaintance of Brown senior, a former RFC pilot, and offered to take his son Eric up flying with him. Hermann Göring had recently announced the existence of the Luftwaffe, and Brown and his father met and were invited to join social gatherings by members of the newly disclosed organisation. In 1936 Brown's father took him to see the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. His father was a former balloon observer and pilot in the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and Brown first flew when he was eight or ten when he was taken up in a Gloster Gauntlet by his father, the younger Brown sitting on his father's knee. Early life īrown was born in Leith, near Edinburgh, in the United Kingdom. He was a pioneer of jet technology into the postwar era. During World War II, he flew many types of captured German, Italian, and Japanese aircraft, including new jet and rocket aircraft.
He flew almost every category of Royal Navy and Royal Air Force aircraft: glider, fighter, bomber, airliner, amphibian, flying boat and helicopter. īrown holds the world record for the most aircraft carrier deck take-offs and landings performed (2,407 and 2,271 respectively) and achieved several "firsts" in naval aviation, including the first landings on an aircraft carrier of a twin-engined aircraft, an aircraft with a tricycle undercarriage, a jet aircraft, and a rotary-wing aircraft. On 3 December 1945, Brown became the first pilot to land on and take off (pictured) from an aircraft carrier in a jet aircraft, when he flew a de Havilland Sea Vampire to HMS Ocean.Ĭaptain Eric Melrose "Winkle" Brown, CBE, DSC, AFC, Hon FRAeS, RN (21 January 1919 – 21 February 2016) was a British Royal Navy officer and test pilot who flew 487 types of aircraft, more than anyone else in history.
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