The Millionaires’ Flying Club
by
David Miller
An RAF Test Pilot’s Story
Anyone interested in flying should enjoy this memoir of a young pilot’s experiences during the important era when the RAF was struggling to change over to jet propulsion. After converting more than 150 students to fly jet aircraft, the author became a test pilot, so that during his service he flew on almost every type of fighter, bomber and transport aircraft in the RAF. It really was, for him, The Millionaires’ Flying Club.
The period covered, was probably unique in the history of the RAF. Having more or less shut down following World War 2 it had to expand rapidly as a consequence of the Korean and the cold wars, and the types of aircraft being introduced were quite different from the piston-engined aircraft of the 1940’s. Flying Training Command was ill-prepared for its task due to a severe shortage of qualified jet instructors and an inadequate mastery of the handling techniques required, resulting in the jet training accident rate becoming unsustainable. A radical and risky solution was adopted. It was simply to ‘cream off’ the top qualifying student of every jet conversion course and send him to Central Flying School to be trained as an instructor. This meant that trainee jet pilots would have instructors with a bare sixty hours more than they had. The author was one of those chosen. Later, following a NATO training display near Paris, he was selected to train as a test pilot, and then joined the Experimental Flying Department of the RAE at Farnborough. Such was the variety of subjects the department had to deal with and, above all, the variety of aircraft used to carry them out, that it became known as the millionaires’ flying club. When he left the RAF after eight years of service, the author had flown over 2,000 hours on almost every type of aircraft in the RAF but, unusually, had never been posted to a squadron.
David ‘Jock’ Miller was born in Dundee and educated at the Morgan Academy there. He attended University College, Dundee, part of St Andrews University, before joining the RAF in 1950 for the eight years covered by this memoir. Back in civilian life, he eventually became an international civil servant with the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation. On retirement after 30 years, he settled in France. He and his French wife Janine, to whom he has been married for more than 50 years, have two children, six grandchildren and one great grandchild. David’s interests include computer sciences, and he is an active member of the Paris branches of the Royal Air Forces Association and the Royal British Legion. He is also an Honorary Member of the Free French Air Force Association
ISBN: 978-1-906302-07-8
PRICE: £9.95 (plus P & P £3.00 UK, £4.00 EU, £6.50 RoW)
Blenheim Press Ltd
Codicote Innovation Centre, St Albans Road, Codicote,
Herts SG4 8WH
