The Dangerous Skies

Ref: 4846

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{detailed description}"So you are more at home in the air than on the ground," said the Wing Commander after Clouston had repeatedly failed his medical for entry into the R.A.F. because of high blood pressure, and had finally proved it to be normal after being flung around the sky in a Moth. The statement was true enough and the man who made it, now Air Chief Marshal Park, has watched Clouston making his home in the sky ever since 1935 when he became one of the first two civilian test pilots appointed to the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough.
It was Clouston who broke Amy Johnson's London to the Cape record and lowered the time for the round trip by five days. It was Clouston who broke all existing records for the London to Australia flight and London to his native New Zealand and back. These magnificent flights in a borrowed private plane hit the headlines in the thirties, but they were only the public manifestation of his adventurous spirit (which, incidentally, led to an offer of £1,000,000 by a Jewish syndicate if he would bomb Hitler on a ceremonial parade). But his day-to-day work as a test pilot was also continuous adventure. His early research into ice formation on aircraft involved repeatedly flying in thunder clouds until the plane was enveloped in ice and the engine stopped, sending the plane dropping to earth like a stone. Research into the use of barrage balloons as a means of defence involved flying into suspended wire, experiments which produced the most hair-raising results. When, later, the Luftwaffe began night bombing it was Clouston who tested out methods of lighting up bombers from the sky, tests which involved flying with 2,000,000-candle-power magnesium flares burning under each wing. Clouston can tell such stories by the hour with a delightful sense of humour and will happily turn the joke against himself—like the story of his wartime demonstration of remote control by radio when, from a Spitfire 10,000 feet up, he inadvertently sank a boatload of V.I.P.s in sixty feet of water.
{Author / Publisher / Date}by Air Commodore A. E. Clouston
Published by Cassell and Company 1954 1st edition. 187pp illustrated. 15x22
{condition}very lightly foxed throughout, slight distortion to binding, in worn and chipped d/j.
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