The British pilot Eric 'Winkle' Brown, who is due to appear on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs this week at the age of 95, has the record for the most aircraft carrier landings according to this BBC article. The figure given is 2,407, which would work out at one landing per day for 6 years, 7 months and 3 days. This seems remarkable, even taking into account the fact that he was a test flyer. Is this figure likely to be accurate? What proportion of the landings took place in combat situations?
The number is accurate, most pilots maintain a personal log book and are scrupulous in their details.
There were some combat landings. Brown served on HMS Audacity, the first escort carrier, in 1941. Brown shot down an FW200 and survived the sinking of his ship. However, the majority of his landings were from his service in the Royal Aircraft Establishment, the UK's test and aerial research center. One of his jobs there was to test out the arrester and later catapult equipment on new aircraft carriers. He would also test both American and British aircraft for their suitability on British carriers. One of his more unusual landings was testing out the flexible deck where an arrester and rubber deck take the place of landing gear.
Brown's autobiography Wings on My Sleeve is a remarkable account of his storied life. His Wings of the Luftwaffe is also a must for anyone who wants to know about how Luftwaffe aircraft actually handled.
Absolutely. He also holds the record for the largest # of different aircraft flown by one person, I believe. His initial service was as a combat pilot on the escort carrier HMS Audacious, protecting convoys in the Atlantic. After the ship was sunk by a submarine, he served as a test pilot at the RAE (Royal Aircraft Establishment) for configuring aircraft to land on aircraft carriers; multiple flights a day is very believable. This continued after the war, testing new aircraft on carrier trials, as well as new techniques for carrier landing such as an experimental rubber deck system and angled flight decks.
It's important to note that while he does hold the carrier landing record, a large portion of his test pilot service did not involve aircraft carriers. In late 1943 he evaluated several captured Italian and German aircraft captured during the invasion of Italy, and after the war he flew pretty much every type of recovered aircraft that the axis produced. He also did important work during British attempts to break the sound barrier, with the DH 108 jet aircraft.
If you're interested I would definitely recommend picking up his book, I think it's called "Wings on My Sleeve." He also wrote a series of articles about the flight experience in several axis aircraft, although I don't remember the name.
I can't see any reason to doubt the accuracy; after training he was on HMS Audacity from September to December 1941 (when it was torpedoed), after that he started working with the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) at Farnborough, so a very small percentage of the landings would have been in 'combat' situations, the vast majority were service trials, or testing different aircraft types, equipment, methods of landing etc., with the consequent supporting data and documentation.
You're absolutely right that the figure is remarkable, though. For an idea of the amount of flying he was doing, there's a section in his autobiography Wings on my Sleeve about carrying out trials with a Seafire; he did a batch of ten landings with progressively lower wind-speed, pitching forward and fracturing the prop on the last one, at which point he popped back ashore for the next aircraft and did a second batch of landings with different arrestor cable settings. Another time, carrying out trials with a Mosquito, he carried out five landings one day, the following day they progressively increased the landing weight, on the third attempt the claw of the arrestor hook sheared off bringing a temporary halt to proceedings. Later on in 1945 he notes that he was averaging four or five flights per day, sometimes seven or eight, and that was after a second pilot had taken over working up the Sea Fury. There's an example of one of his busier days, flying eight different aircraft, taking off from 0810 to 2010 for flights of 30-60 minutes (though no carrier landings that day, just dummy deck landings with a Sea Hornet). Brown was also something of a workaholic, seldom taking leave.
Further reading & listening:
Wings on my Sleeve, Eric 'Winkle' Brown
Raw, but rather interesting, transcript of an interview with James Holland (I'm pretty sure this was the basis for a BBC2 documentary )
Eric Brown in conversation with Rowland White at the Chalke Valley History Festival