John Grierson (pilot)

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John Grierson (2 January 1909 - 21 May 1977[1]) was a UK-born pilot, author and aviation administrator.

John Grierson started his flying lessons at Brooklands while still a schoolboy, graduated from RAF Cranwell in 1929, and flew out to India in 1930 in his own aircraft, named Rouge et Noir, to join his RAF Squadron. In the same aircraft he established a record in 1931 with a flight from India to England, and in 1932 flew 9,000 miles across the USSR to Samarkand.

He met the Lindberghs in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1933. He was at that time attempting to fly solo to America in a Gypsy Moth, but overturned on take-off. His next attempt was in a larger Fox Moth, named Robert Bruce and at the third attempt Grierson successfully made the first London - Ottawa flight, and at the same time, the first solo flight across the Greenland ice cap.

Grierson served as an Operations Officer in the Air Ministry, and was test pilot for Britain's first jet aircraft, the Gloster E.28/39. Post World War 2 he was Director of Civil Aviation in the British Zone of Occupied Germany. He also worked as flight commodore for a factory whaling ship, and as an executive for a leading aircraft corporation in England.

He later lived in Guernsey where he kept touch with aviation by flying his own aeroplane and with polar flying. This included a flight to the South Pole in November 1966. He wrote and lectured widely on early aviation, and Charles Lindbergh. He died just after speaking at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum's symposium on the fiftieth anniversary of Lindbergh's solo New York to Paris flight.[2]

[edit] Works

  • Through Russia by Air
  • High Failure - Solo along the Arctic Air Route
  • Jet Flight
  • Air Whaler
  • Sir Hubert Wilkins - Enigma of Exploration
  • Challenge to the Poles
  • Heroes of the Polar Skies
  • I Remember Lindbergh

[edit] References

  1. ^ Anne Morrow Lindbergh in "I Remember Lindbergh"
  2. ^ I Remember Lindbergh by John Grierson, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977
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