I called my grandpa Buckie. When he was born there were no aeroplanes — they hadn’t been invented but 50 years earlier a man called George had had an idea and he built a glider — this is how it looked:

It actually flew and was called George Cayley’s governable parachute. It was very scary so George sent his coachman up in it who afterwards was so shaken up that he stomped off and said he would never work for George ever again!

When Buckie was 4 years old, in 1903, two brothers called Orville and Wilbur in America built the first proper aeroplane — it looked like this:

The two wings gave it lift, they were shaped so that when it moved forward the air moved faster over the top and with higher pressure underneath the whole thing wanted to lift. It was made to move forward by an engine that drove two propellers in front of the wings. The first day it flew, each of the brothers had a go, Orville flew 37 meters then Wilber flew 260 meters.

By the time Buckie was 12, planes looked like this:

By the time Buckie was 17 he had joined the Navy, because there wasn’t yet a Royal Air Force, and he would actually fly a Sopwith Camel like this one in the First World War.

Flying was very dangerous then — Buckie crashed 16 times. He was quick-witted and lucky and lived until he was old but still drove his car very fast.