Test pilot and the last Briton to hold the world air-speed record
On Saturday 10 March 1956, Peter Twiss, who has died aged 90, took a Fairey Delta 2 jet through two 15km runs, seven and a half miles above camera sites at a Chichester sewage farm and at Ford naval air station, West Sussex. Averaging 1,132.2mph, he broke the world air-speed record, exceeding the previous benchmark by more than 300mph, and so became the first jet pilot officially past 1,000mph.
The following afternoon Fleet Street descended on the aviator. By Monday morning, "1,132" was the most famous number in the country, and Twiss was a hero. The then Manchester Guardian pointed out that he could have flown from London to Manchester in under 10 minutes, while smoking just one cigarette. The New Elizabethan mirage, glimpsed at the time of the 1953 coronation, fleetingly reappeared. Yet as the last British pilot to hold the record, the 34-year-old's triumph also symbolised the end of an era when Britain's military technology, like its foreign policy, enjoyed significant independence from the US.
The following year Twiss became Fairey's chief test pilot and was appointed OBE. However, any hopes the company cherished that the FD2 would metamorphose into a warplane, the FD3 – and thus a lucrative contract – vanished with the Conservative minister Duncan Sandys's cost-cutting defence white paper. The future lay with missiles, predicted Sandys, cancelling all fighter projects apart from the P1 Lightning.
In October 1957 the Soviet Union launched its first satellite, and the space age dawned. Two years later, Fairey, swallowed by Westland, vanished into history.
The Delta, as Twiss called it, had been born into a different age. It was commissioned by the government in 1949 and Twiss first flew it in October 1954. On his 14th outing, faced with a defective fuel system, and thus a dead engine, he took six minutes to glide from 30,000ft to a forced landing at Boscombe Down, Wiltshire.
In October 1955 the FD2 went supersonic. Fairey's chief test pilot, Gordon Slade, and Twiss had conceived the idea of a record attempt, and the latter proposed the plan to Sir Richard Fairey at a shooting party on his Hampshire estate. Thus developed a familiar plotline of scientists, airmen, bureaucrats and (state-funded) private entrepreneurs. Sir Richard, described by Twiss as "six foot seven inches of aristocratic aeronautical history", said yes. But the Ministry of Supply was deeply unenthusiastic.
One of the many ironies surrounding the FD2 was that as the height of the cold war neared, the Fairey team's secrecy blackout over Operation Metrical was not directed towards the Soviet Union, but against their real rivals, the US. Since 1945 there had been four British speed record holders and nine Americans. The latest was the USAF's Horace "Dude" Hanes, who had flown an F-100C Super Sabre at 822.13mph in August 1955.
That Saturday in 1956 was the fifth day of Twiss's attempt on the record, and even after his triumph there were 24 hours when, thanks to a camera glitch, the record hung, agonisingly, in the balance. So Twiss went off alone to an RAF mess for a beer and a slice of veal and ham pie.
Confirmation, acclamation and, soon after that, recrimination ensued. By 6 April the ministry was announcing that 30 claims for damage – caused by the FD2's sonic boom – had been received in the Worthing area. Supersonic flight over Britain was effectively banned. Twiss, on £3,000 a year, was also being pursued by the Inland Revenue.
On 19 April 1956 the USAF's Colonel Chuck Yeager, the first man through the sound barrier (in 1947), told the Royal Aeronautical Society that there were at least three US aircraft that could break the FD2's record. On 12 December 1957 the USAF's Major Adrian E Drew proved it, flying a F101-A Voodoo at 1,207.63mph. From then on, until the record shrivelled into irrelevance, it was taken by six US and three Soviet pilots.
Twiss was born in Lindfield, near Haywards Heath, West Sussex, the grandson of an admiral and the younger of two sons of an army officer and his wife. The marriage of his parents, on the hoof around imperial outposts, had broken up by the early 1930s. In 1931 Twiss's future stepfather introduced him to George Stainforth. The pilot let the 10-year-old climb on to a float of his Supermarine S6b seaplane, in which Stainforth had just hit 407.49mph – and broken the world air-speed record. But the boy remained unimpressed.
Educated at Sherborne school in Dorset, Twiss was good with his hands, good with detail, loved the countryside, made trouble, trained falcons, hated cricket and learned self-reliance, because there was no one, he wrote, to whom he could run home. He did not see his father from 1937 until 1959, at the Farnborough air show. The family life he treasured came from the Salisbury farming family with whom he convalesced from pneumonia as a teenager.
By 1938 Twiss was a City-based Brooke Bond apprentice tea-taster, before fleeing back to the farm. The following year he was turned down for the Fleet Air Arm, but with the second world war under way he was accepted, as a naval airman second class. Qualifying as a pilot, he transferred to Yeovilton, Somerset. His only connection with the Battle of Britain was that the RAF took his unit's only Spitfire away. "We grieved about this," he recalled wryly. The fighter had made them feel important.
Between 1941 and 1943 Twiss served on catapult ships – where Hawker Hurricanes, on one-way sorties, were rocketed off merchant ships to intercept Luftwaffe long-range reconnaissance bombers. By 1942 he was flying Fairey Fulmars on convoy escort through "bomb alley", between Sicily and north Africa. Awarded the DSC at 21, he retrained on Seafires, and won a bar to the medal in 1943, covering Operation Torch, the Anglo-American north African landings of 1942.
Back at Ford, then doubling as an operational research unit, Twiss flew missions over occupied Europe. Putting the unit's theory into night-time practice in Beaufighters and Mosquitoes, he developed an interest in test flying. In 1944 he was seconded to America, and once back in Britain served in the Empire Test Pilots' School at Boscombe Down until 1946, when he joined Fairey as a test pilot.
The FD2 aside, the planes Twiss tested included the Gannet anti-submarine aircraft and the Rotodyne helicopter. In 1956, after the world air-speed record, and with the ban on supersonic flight over Britain, Fairey accepted an offer for Twiss to test the FD2 at the Cazaux airbase in south-west France. There its perfomance was witnessed by Dassault Aviation technologists, who had been working on their own delta for some time.
Soon after Dassault began testing the Mirage III. It sold in large numbers and was to become one of Europe's most successful postwar fighters. Bearing a striking resemblance to the FD2, it was central to Israel's victory in the 1967 six-day war and in 1982 was flown by Argentina's air force over the Falklands.
The British, observed Marcel Dassault, had a clumsy way of doing things. Twiss did not fly the FD2 after 1958, but, revamped as the BAC221, it was used for the Concorde test programme – the airliner sharing its "droop snoot" nose.
Twiss meanwhile joined Fairey Marine at Hamble, Hampshire. As detailed in his autobiography, Faster Than the Sun (1963, revised 2005), much of his life was centred on the Solent, where he had made history. In 1963 he appeared as a villain, firing at Sean Connery from a Fairey speedboat in the James Bond movie From Russia With Love. An enthusiastic powerboat racer, Twiss also took up gliding. His work as a marine consultant led to directorships of Fairey Marine (1968-78) and Hamble Point Marina (1978-88).
Twiss's first three marriages ended in divorce. His fourth wife, Heather Danby, died in 1988. He is survived by his fifth wife, Jane de Lucey, two daughters and several stepchildren. Another daughter predeceased him.
• Lionel Peter Twiss, test pilot and marine consultant, born 23 July 1921; died 31 August 2011
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/02/peter-twiss-obituary
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