Anthony Preston
Anthony is married with three children. His wife, Miranda (Mandy) is American, born in Philadelphia, and her father, Sam Hynes, was a US Marine pilot during the war. Hynes, Professor of English at Princeton university, has written several books on the nature of war and his autobiographical account of learning to fly and of combat, Flights of Passage, makes compulsive reading for anyone interested in flying. A chapter in the Time-Life MHQ (Military History Quarterly) is devoted to an account of the WW2 battlefields as viewed today from the air. The flight, in a Piper Warrior, over France and Belgium, had Anthony as pilot and Sam as navigator and scribe.
Mandy Preston is a Senior Lecturer at the Chichester Institute of Higher Education, a part of Southampton University, and is a contributor to educational journals and author of books on Special Needs (dyslexia and autism). She and Anthony, early in their marriage, flew a Cessna 206 from Topcroft airfield in Norfolk to Senna in Sudan where Anthony flew Grumman AgCat and the C-206 for crop-spraying company Mindacre. Mandy's job was to fold the maps and keep the reserve fuel system working during the long night. She was not a great success with the maps.
The C-206 had insufficient range on its wing tanks for the longer legs, like Egypt to Wadi Halfa, so a system had been installed using an old, under-belly hopper. This had a flexible hose fitted to the front with Araldite, strapped to the starboard strut, and entering the flight compartment through the air vent scoop in front of the starboard door. From there it went down to an electric pump under Mandy's seat. The delivery transparent hose was fed up the side of the cockpit and out through the wing root vent cylinder thing (all Cessna’s have them) along inside the wing leading edge, out through the air vent inlet and up and over into the starboard filler. All very fine you might think.
What we had overlooked was the arrangements failure to provide a head on the pump. It needed a foot valve or non-return valve (n.r.v). The discovery was made the day before we were due to leave, crack of dawn. A desperate search through the back streets of Norwich produced nothing better than a bronze non-return valve for water applications. It didn't look all that professional strapped with sellotape to the strut but it seemed to work. During the flight the n.r.v. proved itself to be a s.r.v. (slow return valve) and it was Mandy's job to watch the meniscus make its inexorable way down the plastic tube. At a point where it threatened to disappear under her seat she prodded the pump switch to resume the cycle. I was perhaps thankful for the distraction during a rather miserable flight one day from Egypt to Luxor when we met up with the ITCZ.Believe you me, the ITCZ is evil in the desert. What it does is to scoop up the sand and make an orange and highly abrasive pea souper. Hour after hour; as Mandy watched the tube, part fixated by now,' I watched the prop - couldn't see any further than the prop - expecting to observe it slowly reduce in diameter till we were left with a cheerfully spinning hub and a tacho off the scale. I didn't like to think what might be making its way through the air inlet filters into the engine. Imagination outstripped reality and on the apron at Luxor later there was little evidence other than highly polished leading edges to the blades. Mandy never really took to aviation. Maybe she overdosed on it from her husband. None of the children are that keen either, for the same reason, maybe.
The two younger children, Sam and Lucy are at school near Anthony's hometown of Worthing in Sussex. Sam flies about the streets of Worthing and Chichester on roller blades, followed closely by Lucy. The older son, Alex, has recently started at Hertford College, Oxford, doing English. His first fight was in Tiger Moth G-ACDC. Anthony joined the tiger Club in 1982. Alex has been up with his dad in Stampes WEF, TKC and SHS, but somehow it never seemed cool enough for him, though he does enjoy inverted flight.
In the first year of the British Aerobatic Association, when the committee included Neil Williams, Manx Kelly, John Blake and James Black, Anthony produced its monthly newsletter. He was an occasional competitor in a Stampe at intermediate level and also flew Zlin 526 and Stampe in aerobatic displays and competitions in France and Italy. He has held a pilot's licence uninterrupted for over 40 years and has been an instructor for many of them. First trained on Tiger Moth and Auster at Ipswich Airport, Nacton, he entered the Royal Air Force in 1956, Flying Training Command, flying piston Provost and Vampire.
In 1963 Anthony moved to Central Africa, living first in Salisbury, Rhodesia (Harare, Zimbabwe) end then Ndola in Zambia, where he instructed on J-3 Cub, Tiger Moth, Tripacer, Colt, Mooney Super 21, Cessna 172 and 182, and Cherokee 140. He provided the crazy flying display (as it was somewhat inappropriately called) at the Mashonaland Flying Club's Air Days at Mount Hampden (now Charles Prince) Airport. He demonstrated the first Mooney in Kenya and flew himself regularly on business trips in the Rhodesias (Zimbabwe, Zambia), Nyasaland (Malawi),Tanganyika (Tanzania), Kenya and Uganda. Returning to England in 1970. Anthony continued to fly with the Tiger Club at Redhill and also gave aerobatic instruction with Mike Riley at Booker on CAP 10 and SV-4C Stampe. He has given aerobatic instruction on Citabria (in the USA where he got his FAA CPL) and a Chipmunk. From 1994 to 1998 Anthony was General Manager of the Popular Flying Association based at Shoreham.
Last updated - 3rd October 99'
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