De Havilland Chipmunk
I flew this beautiful aircraft a few times from Biggin Hill airdrome in the county of Kent, England. It handled like a dream.
Although I’m not flying in this shot…this is the actual aircraft I flew. It was amazing to fly over the fields where Spitfires and Hurricane’s battled Messerschmitt 109’s and German bombers during the “Battle of Britain”…just seventy years earlier. Thanks God Britain prevailed…or there wouldn’t have been a platform for the Allied invasions a few years later. I grew up in south London…they called it “Bomber Alley” during the war, when German bombers and their fighter escorts ld cross the south coast of England on their way to bomb London town.
My mother used to talk about the sky being black with German bombers. My father was strafed by a German fighter plane as he ran home from the pub to be with my mother during an air raid.
He was in the RAF and was part of a demolition team that would clear airports of booby traps left by the retreating German air force near the end of hostilities. It was hard to get him to talk about the war. But he did once tell me about a time they drove into a recently abandoned airport, and there was a big oil drum sitting in the corner of a hanger. Lying on top were these beautiful new tools. My dad said it looked suspicious so he tied a long rope to a spanner (wrench) and walked back to a safe position. He gave the rope a tug and the whole hanger went up in a giant explosion. He once pulled an unconscious man from a burning petrol (gasoline) lorry (truck). He died at age seventy nine back in 1992…my brother John and I miss him.