by Phil Delnon
History was repeating itself: wartime boom was followed by peacetime bust. Many aircraft companies were amalgamating, and famous names were vanishing. Westland had chosen wisely in moving into helicopters: the first product was a Sikorsky built under licence, and this type of venture became a mainstay of the company's survival. Amalgamation with the Saunders-Roe company saw Westland branching out into the design and development of Hovercraft. Ominously for Penrose, each of these initiatives brought their own experienced test pilots.
Penrose continued to pilot new aircraft, however: the turbo-prop Airspeed Ambassador and then the DH Comet. In both cases the entre was the cabin pressurisation system, developed from the one used on the Welkin. He also continued to test-fly the Wyvern, which was still proving troublesome. And it was at the end of a successful Wyvern flight that Penrose was called to the office. Westland had a new job for him: giving up test flying and leading the helicopter sales team. He was 49.
It was a heavy blow. Penrose consoled himself with the prospect of flying helicopters for many years to come, with the knowledge that he could fly his own biplane in his own time, and with his maintained salary.
His world had changed: in place of solitary test-flying he was immersed in social salesmanship. Yet in some respects it remained the same: he met old pioneers of aviation - A.V.Roe, Lord Brabazon, Geoffrey de Havilland, Tommy Sopwith, Oswald Short, Henri Farman. He also met Hanna Reitsch, who in 1955 he permitted to fly a Dragonfly helicopter.
And he also continued to tempt the Grey Man: for example when the engine of his little biplane seized up with such violence that all six bolts sheared away and the propeller simply fell off. As in the old days, Penrose found an empty field and glided in for a landing.
The years rolled on. At 62 Penrose was offered an attractive retirement package, which he accepted. His ventures into boat-building proved fruitless, but he was more successful as an author, which was just as well, for inflation ate into his pension. In all he wrote eleven books, of which his British Aviation (five volumes) became a classic.
And so the wheel turned its circle. Eventually Penrose had to give up one of his boats and one of his two biplanes: they were too just expensive to keep. But it was not quite over yet: for the man who had seen the dawn of aviation, who had taken his baptism of the air dangling from a Cody kite, who had flown an Avro 504, who had test-piloted nearly 400 different civil and military aircraft as diverse as the high-altitude PV3 and the low-altitude Wyvern torpedo bomber, the high-speed Whirlwind and the low-speed Lysander, who had seen the flight of Bleriot aircraft and the Space Shuttle, fate had one more card to turn: now in his seventies, Penrose acquired a tailless microlight aircraft with a seat in the open, a tricycle undercarriage, a Henri-Farman-style horizontal elevator in front, a rear-mounted 17hp engine driving a pusher propeller, and a high-mounted swept wing with vertical fins at the wingtips. He named it the Pterodactyl Ascender, and flew it and his other biplane well into his eighties. He died on 31st August 1996, aged 92. Let the last words be his:
A gallon of petrol, and the skies are mine again.
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