Frederick F. Minchin

Frederick Frank Reilly Minchin CBE DSO MC was born in Madras on 16 June 1890 and was educated at Eastbourne College. He passed out of Sandhurst in 1909 and after 2 years resigned his commission to train as a civilian pilot at the recently formed Eastbourne Aviation Company. In 1913 he obtained his Royal Aero Club certificate flying a Bristol Boxkite at the Langney Aerodrome Eastbourne. In 1915 he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps(RFC) with the rank of lieutenant and in 1916 was awarded the Military Cross for his daring night bombing flights into enemy territory over Egypt and Palestine. He received the Distinguished Service Order in 1918 for his outstanding leadership in directing raids against Bulgarian and Austro-Hungarian armies.

In 1918 the RFC and the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) were merged into the Royal Air Force. In July 1919 he served in India and was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) having gained three awards for gallantry and Mentioned in Dispatches on three occasions.

In 1923 Minchin joined one of the first British commercial airlines, Instone Air Line, operating from Croydon Aerodrome near London.

On 31 August 1927 Lieutenant Colonel Dan Minchin, Captain Leslie Hamilton and Princess Anne of Löwenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg took off from Upavon airfield in a Dutch Fokker F.VIIA named the St. Raphael in a bid to become the first aviators to cross the Atlantic from east to west.

The St. Raphael was last sighted some 800 miles west of Galway heading for Newfoundland. The St Raphael was never seen again, and the fate of Lieutenant Colonel Minchin, Captain Leslie Hamilton and Princess Loewenstein-Wertheim remains a mystery.