Early Flights
Donald Bennett was born the youngest son of a grazier in Toowoomba, Queensland. He attended Brisbane Grammar School and later joined the Royal Australian Air Force in 1930 and transferred to the Royal Air Force a year later, starting with the flying boats of 20 Squadron. Bennett developed a passion for accurate flying and precise navigation that would never leave him. After a period as an instructor at RAF Calshot, he left the service in 1935 (retaining a reserve commission) to join Imperial Airways. Over the next five years, Bennett specialised in long distance flights, breaking a number of records and pioneering techniques which would later become commonplace, notably air-to-air refuelling. In July 1938 he piloted the Mercury part of the Short Mayo Composite flying-boat across the Atlantic; this flight earned him the Oswald Watt Gold Medal for that year.
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Famous quotes containing the words early and/or flights:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
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And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”
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