Flying in Father's Slipstream

Harry and Tom Eeles both served in the Royal Air Force as pilots over the time span of 1929 to 2010, eighty years of the Royal Air Force’s one hundred year’s existence. Joining the adolescent Royal Air Force from an unlikely background, Harry Eeles had a varied and interesting career as a fighter pilot, aide-de-camp, weapons instructor, Battle of Britain fighter squadron commander, numerous high profile staff and command appointments including two years working for Chief of Air Staff and four years as Commandant of the Royal Air Force College Cranwell.

Tom Eeles followed his father into the Royal Air Force and had a wide range of operational and instructional flying tours, including embarked time on an aircraft carrier with the Fleet Air Arm, a tour as the Royal Air Force’s chief examiner of instructional flying and command of a large flying training base.

Royal Air Force pilots are required to record all their flying in a logbook. During his research the author, whilst looking through his father’s flying logbooks, was struck by some of the entries, which seemed to have an interesting story behind them. He has chosen a selection of flights from both his father’s and his own flying logbooks and has elaborated on what was originally a simple one-line entry, recording just the date, type of aircraft and duty undertaken, into a full description of the personal and technical issues associated with each individual flight.

1. Marshal Sir Ian Macfadyen, who joined the Royal Air Force at the same time as the author at Cranwell in 1960, has written the foreword. His father was Harry Eeles’s first flying instructor at Cranwell in 1929, thus neatly completing the link between the past and the present. Flying in Father’s Slipstream is a book of great historical, technical and human interest.