Monday, January 15, 2007

Profile of the Month - Peter(Pete)Beechey

Profile of the Month – January 2007.

Peter was born in 1923 at Southall, Middlesex, then a pleasant market town on the western outskirts of London. It was inevitable that he would go into aviation. His father had been in the RFC, his older cousins worked at the Airspeed factory with Neville Shute. Norway and Heston aerodrome was a bike-ride away. His mother ran a private preparatory school but was wise enough to see that Peter would profit from a technical education, and in 1939 he entered an apprenticeship with the Fairey Aviation Company.. He volunteered for aircrew duties in 1941 but was refused entry into the RAF because of his reserved occupation. When he was accepted in 1942 the company transferred him to their aerodrome at Heathrow, then a small grass airfield where London Airport now stands and he flew as an observer on flight tests of new Fairey Albacores and Fireflies.

A hold-up in aircrew training in late 1943 saw many aircrew cadets farmed out to Bomber Command for up to a year. Duties included re-fuelling, bomb-dump, and manning the crash-tender. Peter was lucky. He was with 103, & 576 Squadrons at Elsham Wolds and 158 Squadron at Lisset in Yorkshire and staffed the runway control caravan. Every cadet was attached to an operational crew and flew with them on training flights. Many friendships resulted, but there were nightly casualties and they lost many friends. They matured quickly. Suddenly the future did not appear so glamorous.

Peter was within a few weeks of completing his pilot training in S.Rhodesia when the war finished and all training ceased. After returning to Britain they had to accept a
five-year engagement if they wished to complete their training. He was finally awarded his ‘Wings’ in September 1947 and posted to 242 Squadron, Transport Command as a co-pilot on Avro York aircraft on the trunk route flights to Singapore.

In July 1948 the Squadron moved to Wunstorf near Hanover to join the start of the Berlin Airlift. He flew this for a year except for ten days in October when he and Eileen were married. They had met in 1944 in Yorkshire.. After the Lift he flew Dakotas as a Staff-pilot/instructor with No.1 Parachute & Glider Training School, on the Transport Command Development Unit and the BABS Training Flight.. In 1951 he completed the CFS course and instructed on AFS Oxfords at Holme-on-Spalding Moor and Pershore for three years before leaving the service in February 1954.

By this time Peter and Eileen had two children, Christopher and Patricia and had lived in a caravan for five years. They parked themselves in a wood opposite Denham aerodrome while Peter went to a school at Ealing to get his civil licences. They had no income. His gratuity after twelve years in the RAF was two-hundred pounds and he supplemented this by instructing at Denham for five shillings an hour. By September he had gained his Airline Transport licence and joined Britavia as a First Officer on Handley Page Hermes operating from Blackbushe to East & West Africa, Aden and Singapore on War Office trooping flights.

They flew hard. There were no flight-time limitations other than a requirement to undergo a medical examination if flying 120 hours in 28 days and they were having medicals all up and down the route. The company was part of the Silver City Group and Peter was soon appointed captain on DC3’s and Bristol Freighters based at Ferryfield in Kent They flew holiday tours but also many charter flights. During the Hungarian Revolution in the winter of 1956 they rescued refugees from blacked-out airfields on the Hungarian/Austrian border and in early 1957 he was engaged in clandestine flights at night from a disused airfield near Marseilles landing in the Sahara to supply mobile French Foreign Legion units with arms and ammunition in their desert war with Morocco. He returned to Blackbushe in March with a command on the Britavia Hermes.

In 1959 Peter was appointed chief pilot to the Nigerian Department of Civil Aviation.. Nigeria was approaching independence and his job was to establish flight-safety including radio-aids, accident investigation and a licencing system to include flight-checks. The family travelled to Lagos by sea and soon settled into Colonial life. Eileen became travel manager for Costains while the children went to the Corona school near their house on Ikoyi Island. where their garden became a noisy playground for children of all races. Peter had also to establish a Federal Flying Training School and a Prime Minister’s Flight. The years passed too quickly and when they left they realised that they could never again settle in UK. for any length of time.

They also realised that it would be hard to ensure a pension in the uncertain aviation world of those years and decided that they would go for short-term employment where high salaries were available. Peter joined that unique band of individual British pilots with wide licence coverage who were known to be available at short notice and willing to fly almost anything, anywhere, provided that it paid well and was reasonably safe. There was unrest in the Middle East, Vietnam in the Far East, the Communists in Malaya and confrontation with Indonesia in Borneo while many local conflicts were rumbling in Africa. Such jobs were not hard to find and along with Gerry Parkinson, Ray Gifford and others ‘Pete’Beechey’ became a well-known name on these routes.

Over the next 22 years he flew for the national airlines of Iran. Borneo, Malaysia, Singapore, Yemen and Algeria and briefly with Britannia Airways in UK during a critical time in the childrens' education. Eileen had travelled with Peter and made a home for them wherever they found themselves. The children were at school in UK but spent every holiday with their parents. None of them ever had any regrets for the life-style that they had chosen and valued the friendships they had made.

On his 60th birthday Peter retired. He had been flying Boeing 737’s for 14 years. He trusted it as he had trusted the DC3 and had resisted transfer to other types. He and Eileen moved from Algiers to their apartment in Majorca. In 1985 they bought the house in Javea where they still live. In February 1988 he gathered a few aircrew friends round him and started the Costa Blanca Branch of the ACA of which he is still Life Vice-President.

The rest is history.

Friday, January 12, 2007

Welcome


This is the ACA Costa Blanca Branch Blog spot. You will have reached this site from our web page, and from here you will be able to retrieve useful information and announcements. But to welcome you a video message from our Chairman - Brian Weskett can be seen by clicking the link in links frame on the right.