Cheryl Bailey finishes her pieces on the Silver Wing Service with a maverick celebrity pilot:
The Silver Wing flights from Croydon to
Le Bourget, Paris in the 1930s were a feature of the celebrity
lifestyle of the time and the pilots involved became celebrities too.
Foremost among them was Capt. Oscar Philip Jones, known simply as 'O.P.' to his friends and colleagues but certainly not to the other
staff of Croydon Airport and Imperial Airways where he was viewed
with awed respect and a tinge of fear.
His flying career had begun at the age
of 18 towards the end of WW1. At the end of the war, he became a
pilot in a firm offering ‘joy rides’ to passengers and then
progressed to acting as a pilot for Instone Airlines which was one of
several which joined forces in 1924 to form Imperial Airways. He flew
many routes and, indeed, in 1926 was the first pilot to transport a
member of the royal family when the Prince of Wales (later Edward
VIII) flew from Paris to London.
