Book review: Exploring the ordinary, adventurous heroes of the golden age of aviation

This book opens with a description of the last leg of a flight from Karachi to London in 1930.

The plane involved is a secondhand de Havilland Moth; the occupants are two young men from India, Aspy Engineer (his real name) and RN Chawla.

Their purpose is to win a handsome cash prize and a trophy to be awarded to the first Indian national to fly solo from Karachi to London, or vice-versa.

The last leg should have entailed a couple of flight hours from north France to London, but the weather turned foul. 

With no map, no radio, and no weather forecast to help them, our heroes were blown off-course. Aspy Engineer once described navigation as, “you have to smell your way around”.

They were hopelessly lost over the North Sea for five hours before eventually landing in Thetford, Norfolk. They set out for London the following morning and won the prize.

Aspy Engineer later flew the Moth back to Karachi on his own; he was only 17 years old.

The Moth was a two-seater airplane designed by Captain Geoffrey de Havilland. 

It’s classic look depicts what the author, Alexander Norman describes as “the golden age of aviation”.

De Havilland, born in 1892, grew up tinkering with engines. 

In 1911 his maternal grandfather gave him his inheritance (£1,000) to set up an airplane design business. 

Just as this money ran out, de Havilland got a job with the British government. 

By the end of the First World War, one quarter of the British Air Force’s planes were de Havilland designs.

His dream was to design a plane that would be cheap enough for the common man to purchase. 

When he finally launched the Moth in 1925, its £600 price, though deemed reasonable, was beyond the dreams of the common man. 

At the time, the average industrial wage was £1per week. 

Notwithstanding this, the Moth was central to many of the great aviation feats and records set over the next 12 years.

Much of this desire to conquer the air was inspired by the members of the London Aero Club. 

This was an egalitarian club where the wealthy, such as Philip Sassoon and commoners, such as Amy Johnson, were united by the thrill of flying, the search for adventure, and a large dash of ‘derring-do’.

What is also noteworthy is that it was often women, and not men, who piloted these adventures.

This was due to many of their male counterparts losing their lives in the First World War, but it also reflected new freedoms that women, especially women of wealth and status, experienced in the post-suffrage era.

Amy Johnson was undoubtedly the princess of these pilots. Her access to flying came through the London Aero Club. 

Her epic journey in a Moth to Australia filled the British press with daily accounts of her progress.

Sophie Elliot-Lynn from Limerick was one of a number of Irish women to feature in this golden age. 

Sophie was a motorcycle dispatch rider in the First World War, a founder of the British Women’s Athletic Association, and the first woman to fly from Cape Town to London. 

By then she had become Lady Heath. The feats of Lady Mary Baily of Monaghan, is worthy of a book of their own.

Mainly because of advances in design, production of the Moth ceased in the mid 1930s. 

By then all the great flying records had been set and broken several times, and the public’s interest had waned.

During the Second World War all available flying craft were subsumed into the British Air Forces. 

The Moths that survived those years returned to private ownership and, since then the stock of active Moths around the world has dwindled.

The British empire cracked and fissured as the 20th century progressed. 

Yet, thanks to Captain de Havilland’s Moth airplane, the empire’s veneer of greatness remained intact during the 1920s and 30s.

However, as Alexander Norman outlines in this excellent book, it was not Captain de Havilland, or his Moth, who were central to papering over the cracks; it was the remarkable men and women who risked their lives for adventure, the ambition of setting records, and the sheer thrill of flying.