Eric Winkle Brown's take on famous aircraft and world events. Complete documentary series.
From pilot on a carrier to being sunk by a Nazi German submarine, to test pilot, and the first deck landing of a twinengine aircraft in the world, a De Havilland Mosquito.
Eric Brown flew them all: Messerschmitt Me 262, Komet, FW 189 Own, F104 Starfighter, and countless more.
He was probably the greatest test pilot that ever lived.

Captain Eric Melrose "Winkle" Brown, CBE, DSC, AFC, Hon FRAeS, RN (21 January 1919 – 21 February 2016) was a British Royal Navy officer and test pilot who flew 487 types of aircraft, more than anyone else in history.

Brown holds the world record for the most aircraft carrier deck takeoffs and landings performed (2,407 and 2,271, respectively) and achieved several "firsts" in naval aviation, including the first landings on an aircraft carrier of a twinengined aircraft, an aircraft with a tricycle undercarriage, a jet aircraft, and a rotarywing aircraft.

He flew almost every category of Royal Navy and Royal Air Force aircraft: glider, fighter, bomber, airliner, amphibian, flying boat, and helicopter. During World War II, he flew many types of captured German, Italian, and Japanese aircraft, including new jet and rocket aircraft. He was a pioneer of jet technology in the postwar era.

Brown was born in Leith, near Edinburgh, in the United Kingdom. His father was a former balloon observer and pilot in the Royal Flying Corps (RFC). Brown first flew when he was eight or ten when he was taken up in a Gloster Gauntlet by his father, the younger Brown sitting on his father's knee.

In 1936, Brown's father took him to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Hermann Göring had recently announced the existence of the Luftwaffe, and Brown and his father met and were invited to join social gatherings by members of the newly disclosed organization. At one of these meetings, Ernst Udet, a former World War I fighter ace, was fascinated to make the acquaintance of Brown senior, a former RFC pilot, and offered to take his son Eric up flying with him. Eric eagerly accepted the German's offer, and after he arrived at the appointed airfield at Halle, he soon flew in a twoseat Bücker Jungmann. He recalled the incident nearly 80 years later on the BBC radio program Desert Island Discs.
You talk about aerobatics – we did every one I think and I was hanging on to my tummy. So, when we landed, he gave me the fright of my life because we approached upsidedown. Then he rolled out just in time to land, he said to me as I got out of the cockpit, slapped me between the shoulder blades, and gave me the old WW1 fighter pilots' greeting, Hals und Beinbruch, which means broken neck and broken legs, but that was their greeting. But he told me you'll make a fine fighter pilot – do me two favors: learn to speak German fluently and fly.

During the Olympic Games, Brown witnessed Hitler shaking hands with Jesse Owens.

In 1937, Brown left the Royal High School and entered the University of Edinburgh, studying modern languages with an emphasis on German. While there, he joined the university's air unit and received his first formal flight instructions. In February 1938, he returned to Germany under the sponsorship of the Foreign Office, having been invited to attend the 1938 Automobile Exhibition by Udet, who was then a Luftwaffe major general. He saw the demonstration of the FockeWulf Fw 61 helicopter flown by Hanna Reitsch before a small crowd inside the Deutschlandhalle. During this visit, he met and got to know Reitsch, whom he had also briefly met in 1936.

On returning to the United Kingdom then at war, he joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve before subsequently joining the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve as a Fleet Air Arm pilot, where he was posted to 802 Naval Air Squadron, initially serving on the first escort carrier, HMS Audacity, converted and thus named in July 1941. He flew one of the carrier's Grumman Martlets. During his service on board Audacity, he shot down two FockeWulf Fw 200 Condor maritime patrol aircraft, using headon attacks to exploit the blind spot in their defensive armament.

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