If you haven’t been to a meeting for a while how about coming on April 14


The Concorde Club, Pavilion Suite



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The Concorde Club, Pavilion Suite

Thursday 14th April 2011 at 1930hrs.
If you arrive early visit the main club building for a meal, snack and/or drink where you will meet several other members who use the facility prior to the meeting, as does the committee!
Should you not be able to attend this time, make a note in your diary that the next function will be on Thursday, 13th October 2011 and we’ll hope to see you then.
Best Regards,
Steve Wand

On behalf of the Icarus committee.



The eulogy given by Captain John Mason at “PJ’s” cremation service on 28th January 2011:
Captain Peter John McKeown
I knew Pete McKeown by sight long before I met him – everyone in BEA knew him, I’m sure. I eventually met him at 15.50 on 23rd December 1963. I can be that accurate because my logbook shows I operated a Dusseldorf flight with him on a Comet 4b from Heathrow. What my logbook doesn’t show is that I was late checking in. Peter had gone to Met Briefing and we two First Officers spun a coin for who would sit in the RHS, the loser having to sit on the engineer’s panel. To my delight, I won. When Capt McKeown returned I introduced myself and apologised for being late, explaining that I had been unexpectedly delayed by the amount of pre-Christmas traffic I had encountered. He clearly wasn’t impressed and said,

as a final statement, “We know who’s sitting on the panel today, don’t we?” which put me in my place – literally. Having quite properly admonished me, we then had a very pleasant flight and went our separate ways. I could not have imagined the influence he would have on my life.


Peter was born on 27th November 1922 in Camden Town – a Cockney, of which he was always proud. I couldn’t initially find information on his education, but I found out at the golf club that he left school at 14 and was an apprentice telephone engineer. He joined the RAF as soon as he was able, even “amending” his age (unsuccessfully) to try and get in early. He was selected for pilot training which took place in Saskatchewan, Canada in 1942/43, flying the Tiger Moth and then the Cessna Crane, a twin-engined aircraft rather like an Anson. His OCU was in Nova Scotia on to Hudsons and he came home in August expecting a posting to a squadron. But no; January 1944 found him on a Wellington conversion course at Nutts Corner, Belfast, but on completion his hoped-for posting to a squadron still did not materialise. Instead in March he was seconded to BOAC and another conversion course on to the Dakota, which he was then to fly for two years as a co-pilot. The routes he flew took him via Gibraltar to the Eastern Med or long flights across the North Sea to Stockholm and Gothenberg, Sweden still being a neutral country.
From January 1946 he had been in the European Division of BOAC but in August it became BEA. That same year, with 2,500 hours to his name, he got his Command. He was 23. He duly became a Training Captain and moved on to the Viking and by 1953 was one of the lead pilots in the introduction into service of the Viscount 700, the world’s first jet-powered commercial airliner.
Early in 1955 he and 10 or so of his Training Captain colleagues converted on to the Convair 340 in preparation for re-starting Lufthansa. On 1st March he commanded the first Lufthansa flight since 1944, flying Hamburg-Dusseldorf-Frankfurt-Munich and return (6 sectors). The T/Cs remained in Germany for a year, training the German pilots and establishing a rapport with them that was not matched by the TWA pilots who took over the contract. In 2005, when Lufthansa celebrated its 50th Anniversary, Peter and his few remaining colleagues were invited to take part and flew on a repeat of that inaugural flight – but not in the same aircraft, and certainly not with Peter at the controls. He was over the moon with the hospitality and friendship shown to them after all that time. I asked him if anyone was there from TWA and he said “No, and they weren’t invited!”
He came back to play his part in the introduction of the Viscount 802, and in January 1959 he was awarded the Queen’s Commendation for Valuable Services in the Air and his Master Air Pilot Certificate from the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators. The introduction into service of the Comet 4b followed, a major task as BEA moved into the pure jet era, and he remained on it as the most senior non-management Training Captain until 1965 when he was at last given a management role as Senior Training Captain – but on the Viscount, not the Comet. In 1967 our paths crossed for the 2nd time when he flew with me on my Command Check. I wondered how good his memory was, and if he remembered our first meeting, but if he did, and he had a very good memory, he gave no indication. Instead, he gave me a good lesson in how to settle a candidate whose nerves he knew would be jangling a bit before such an important test, and made the whole day a relaxed and happy experience. He moved on to the BAC 111 as STC in 1968, but that didn’t last long before something called BEA Airtours appeared on his horizon.
It was at Chartridge, which BEA used for management training, where he had what he said was a chance encounter with Capt Bill Baillie, who had been Deputy Flight Operations Director, but was now the MD of a charter airline that BEA were setting up at Gatwick. Peter insisted that the conversation started because, quite by chance, they were standing in adjacent stalls in the gents’ loo. Capt Baillie asked him if he had thought about applying for the job of Flight Manager, in effect Chief Pilot, but Peter, with his management background only in training, had thought he would not be considered sufficiently qualified. He didn’t take long before saying “Yes, he would like to apply”. This was clearly a huge relief to Bill Baillie as none of the Flight Managers he considered experienced enough wanted to go to a charter outfit at Gatwick but now, by some miracle, Capt Baillie and Airtours had got the right man for the job.
The majority of the Captains applying were quite junior but many had flown the Comet as First Officers and were bursting to fly it in command. From this group Peter picked most of his Training Captains and built an airline of real enthusiasts, led by the greatest enthusiast of them all, and I was lucky enough to be one of them. On 6th March 1970 he and his crew operated the 14.00 Palma and BEA Airtours was airborne. Peter was a charming man and an inspirational leader, setting the right tone, expecting the highest standards, giving Captains all the authority they could want and always backing up their decisions that he thought were right and encouraging everyone to use their initiative to keep the operation running. He had excellent relations with the other managers he worked with and with BALPA, too. Above all, he was a very “human” man with a great sense of humour – something he certainly needed from time to time.
Over the next few years the Comet was phased out, Airtours converted to B707-436s obtained from BOAC, and began operating world-wide from 1972. On 26th January 1974 he took off on a round-the-world charter flight, returning to Gatwick on 25th February after 14 sectors to 14 countries. In his study are a couple of mementoes of that flight, but the best one by far was a lovely lady passenger called Margaret who became Peter’s 2nd wife, his first wife, Moira, having died some time before. All looked rosy for the future, but that was not to last long.
In 1975 a heart problem was detected at his medical and, losing his licence, he had to retire after 33 years and 16,000 hours of flying. He was devastated, but it did not dim his enthusiasm for life. He took up golf and 2 hole-in-one trophies in his study show he occasionally hit good shots. He had joined GAPAN in 1956, becoming a Liveryman ten years later and was elected on to the Court from 1973-76. He had also been initiated into Freemasonry in 1973 and joined Per Caelum, the Guild’s Lodge, in the following year and in Masonic circles was highly respected and active until ill health began to take effect. (PS – I didn’t mention this when I spoke, but in the late 70s Margaret was behaving strangely which the medics assessed as a psychological problem but Peter insisted that they do a CT scan, which revealed a brain tumour, fortunately cured after an operation. Margaret insisted that Peter saved her life, and she was probably right.) He was found to have cancer in the mid-80s and a lung was removed, not entirely successfully, so Margaret found herself looking after Peter more and more, effectively becoming his nurse as well as his wife. Colon cancer followed and was defeated, as he bore the medical problems with the utmost bravery and determination. He lived for 25 years with one lung (and that one only on half power) and succeeded, to a remarkable extent, to live a normal life. Many people would have given up, but that was never his way. He always acknowledged that, without the nursing of his beloved Margaret, with whom he shared 36 years of very happy marriage, he could not have survived as long as he did. His daughter, Linda, who for several years was a Stewardess in Airtours, was always close to his heart and he was very proud of her and his grandson, Grant, who is a talented musician.
As time passed, his golfing required a buggy and winter hibernation became the sensible way to avoid infections but even as his health inexorably declined he still was able to attend the Airtours 40th Anniversary Reunion at Brooklands last March, an occasion which gave him as much pleasure as his presence there gave others. Last year, a member of the Golf Society who did not know Peter in his prime said with a voice full of admiration “He’s physically frail now, but he still has a man’s handshake.” And this said so much about Peter in a sentence. He was always able, with a twitch of his RAF moustache and a twinkle in his blue eyes, to charm any lady but equally, he was held in the highest esteem by men, who greatly enjoyed his company and friendship.
So it was a very sad time when, on Friday, 21st January, he lost his final battle. Whatever he did, he seemed to make friends and he was a true and faithful friend to us all. He had more influence on my life than any other man, but I am sure he has been an influence for good on all who have been touched by him, and not just the pilots he trained. I have been proud to know him, work for him and call him my friend. I will miss him very much, but so will we all.
Thank you, Peter.
Goodbye and God Bless

Captain Peter Middleton
Wartime RAF pilot who, in peacetime, flew for BEA and accompanied the Duke of Edinburgh on a tour of South America.
Peter Middleton’s first close encounter with the Royal Family was when he acted as First Officer to the Duke of Edinburgh on a two-month flying tour of South America that Prince Phillip made in 1952.
Prince Phillip piloted 49 of the tour’s 62 flights, often with Middleton – who had been specially chosen for the tour by BEA – by his side. Middleton was later sent a letter of thanks and a pair of gold cufflinks from Buckingham Palace.


Peter Francis Middleton was born in Leeds in 1920, the third son of Richard Middleton and Olive Lupton, a family of mill owners and solicitors. After early tutoring at home where he developed a love of music and nature, Middleton attended Clifton College, Bristol before gaining a place at Oxford to study English. But within months of his arrival he joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve.


He was posted to Canada as a flying instructor and it was two and a half years before he finally saw action, joining 605 Squadron at Manston, Kent in August 1944. Flying Mosquito fighter-bombers, he was detailed to try to tip the wings of German doodlebugs to divert them away from devastating London. As Germany collapsed he was based in Belgium, Holland and Germany itself before being demobbed in 1946.
His first post-war job was with the Lancashire Aircraft Corporation. In Leeds he courted and later married Valerie Glassborow, a bank manager’s daughter. He was 6ft 2in tall: she was nearly a foot shorter, vivacious and enjoyed all his jokes. They had four sons.

In 1952 Middleton joined BEA and the family moved to Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, where they lived until his retirement in 1974, when they moved to Vernham Dean, Hampshire. On the very last page of his log book, Middleton calculated that he had flown 16,000 hours or five and a half million miles during his career, “or 220 times round the world”.


But well before his retirement he had discovered another love; sailing. It had started with the building of small dinghies – the first in the family dining room – that he sailed with his sons on the Thames.
In August 1976 he and his wife set sail from the Hamble in their 35ft ketch Nairjaune to cross the Atlantic. They spent Christmas in the Caribbean and then headed for the Bahamas where the following February, ten miles off the coast of the tiny island of Mayaguana, with a terrible crash, they hit a reef.
The boat could not be saved and, gathering a few essentials, they set out for shore in their life raft. Landing on a deserted beach, they made themselves comfortable for the night dining off Scotch and ginger biscuits. The following day they found the main town. The Mayaguana people were soon chugging out to examine the broken hull of the Nairjaune and her equipment. The Middletons were invited to visit a local family and found themselves being unabashedly served tea on crockery “borrowed” from their boat.
Returning to England, Middleton continued to sail for the next 20 years. His grandchildren recall the best of time being on the boat when they would respond to his every command by crying out “Aye, aye, Kipper”. They never tired of spreading the underside of his toast with peanut butter, which he hated but responded to with theatrical good humour.
Middleton had a boundless enthusiasm for life. As well as a keen sailor he was a photographer, writer and carpenter, making tiny tables and chairs for this grandchildren, a pirate ship for them play on in the garden and repairing pews in his local church.
His 90th birthday party was attended by the whole family.
Middleton’s wife Valerie died in 2006 and he leaves four sons and five grandchildren.

Captain Barbara Harmer
Apprentice hairdresser who made a remarkable career change to become Britain’s first and only woman Concorde pilot in 1993
In March 1993, at the age of 39, Barbara Harmer flew herself into the annals of aviation when she became the first woman pilot of the supersonic airliner Concorde.
She remained the Concorde’s only female pilot to fly regular commercial services in the ten years from then until the world’s only Mach 2 civil jet was withdrawn from service by its two operators, British Airways and Air France, in the wake of a catastrophic accident to an Air France Concorde at Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris, in July 2000 in which 113 people died in the aircraft and on the ground.
An Air France pilot, Béatrice Valle, piloted several flights between the Paris crash and Concorde’s final withdrawal from service in 2003.
For Barbara Harmer, becoming a Mach 2 pilot at 60,000ft was a far cry from her first job as a hairdresser in her home town Bognor Regis, a job she stuck at for six years after leaving school at 15. For her, the decision to become a pilot on Concorde was not so much one of those flashes of inspiration that often seize future pilots in extreme youth, as a gradual realisation via several years of resolute application and acquired responsibility — first as an air traffic controller, then as a flying instructor, and later as a commuter airline pilot — that the pilot’s “grail” of Concorde flying might be possible.
Of her many memorable experiences transporting celebrity passengers on Concorde, she always rated that of taking the Manchester United football team to confront Bayern Munich in the Champions’ League final in Barcelona in May 1999 as among the most exciting. “I felt quite emotional as I taxied the Concorde out on to the runway with British flags flying and thousands of people wishing the team luck on the way.” Manchester United did not let their Concorde pilot — or themselves — down. They came home with the trophy having scored two goals in injury time after trailing Bayern by a goal for most of the game.
After Concorde was withdrawn from service Harmer retrained and became a BA captain on long-haul routes.
Barbara Harmer was born in Loughton, Essex, in 1953, the youngest of four daughters of a commercial artist father and a haberdasher mother. Educated at a convent school after the family moved to Bognor Regis, West Sussex, she did well at O level, but as she watched an elder sister struggling unhappily to cope with her A levels she came to the conclusion that this was not for her and left at 15 to become an apprentice hairdresser. She was good at it and for some years felt perfectly happy until it occurred to her that she was becoming stuck in a rut.
Although her experience of aeroplanes was at that time non-existent she applied for a job as a trainee air traffic controller at Gatwick airport, at the same time paying for flying lessons, and in due course gaining her private pilot’s licence. At the same time she studied four A levels in her spare time, with an idea of doing a law degree. Her aim at that stage was to transfer to the accident investigation unit, but she found that her employers at the Civil Aviation Authority were not encouraging, imagining that she would want to “settle down”.
Feeling that she had hit a brick wall, her thoughts turned to a career as a commercial pilot. She had no means of funding the course for herself (at that time the fees were £40,000) but reasoned that a route into her ambition might well lie through qualifying first as a flying instructor. To get on a course for this required 140 more flying hours than she had at that time, but she patiently amassed them over the next 12 months and, after qualifying, got a job as a flying instructor at Goodwood Flying School. Over the next two years, while she worked there, she also studied by correspondence course and, on a £10,000 bank loan, obtained the necessary air experience. In May 1982 she finally obtained her commercial pilot’s licence.

She now had the qualifications. An actual job was more problematical, but after more than 100 applications she found a job at last with a commuter airline on Humberside. After flying with it for 15 months she heard that British Caledonian was recruiting pilots and in March 1984 she was taken on by the airline.


Now she was flying the large, wide-bodied, long-haul tri-jet DC10, in addition to the much smaller British BAC 111. The merger of British Caledonian with British Airways in 1987, lamented by some, turned out to be a great opportunity for this now very experienced large-jet commercial pilot. Of the 3,000 pilots employed by BA only 60 were at that time women, but in 1992 she was selected for the intensive six-month conversion course for the pride of the BA fleet: Concorde.
Finally, on March 25, 1993, she earned her place in the record books when, as a BA first officer, she piloted Concorde from London’s Heathrow airport to JFK in New York. It was the beginning of a career not only as a top British Airways pilot, but also as an inspiration to women of her generation, much sought for public-speaking engagements. The Mach 2 three-hour flights to New York soon became routine, although she never lost the wonder of seeing the world from 60,000ft, while traversing the skies at 1,350mph.
After BA suspended its Concordes in the wake of the Paris accident in 2000, she became a pilot on twin-engined Boeing 777s, and qualified as an airline captain. By that time BA had retired its Concorde fleet, in 2003, and she continued to fly long haul as a 777 captain until she took voluntary redundancy from BA in 2009.
Barbara Harmer’s life outside flying was as adventurous as that within it. She was a fully qualified commercial offshore yacht master and often commanded the Concorde crew in international yachting events. She had won several races, and, even though she knew she was seriously ill, she had intended to contest a transatlantic event in her French-built 10.5-metre Archambault 35 in 2013. A keen gardener, she had created a Mediterranean-style garden at her home overlooking the sea at Felpham, West Sussex.
She is survived by her partner of 25 years, Andrew Hewett, a former police detective inspector and counter terrorism officer.
Captain Barbara Harmer, airline pilot, was born on September 14, 1953. She died of cancer on February 20, 2011, aged 57

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