DIANA BARNATO WALKER

LIKE FATHER, like daughter. Or at least if the metrics are a love of the good life, of adventure—and of things that go fast and make plenty of noise.

Diana Barnato Walker MBE FRAeS (1918-2008) was an English aviatrix and sportswoman.

Diana was a daughter of Woolf Barnato, diamond and gold mining heir, three-times Le Mans winner, one of the Bentley Boys and international sportsman (www.wp.me/p2ETap-1K2). By the time she was 22, as part of the Air Transport Auxiliary, Diana had piloted 240 Supermarine Spitfires. Later, in an English Electric Lightning T14, she would be the first British woman to break the sound barrier. And Diana had lots of adventures not confined to World War II nor the sound barrier.

Spreading My Wings, by Diana Barnato Walker, foreword by Rt. Hon. Lord Shawcross, Grub Street, 2003. Both www.abebooks.com and www.amazon.com list it.

On publication of Spreading My Wings, Diana won a £5 wager with a World War II fighter ace who said she’d never be able to write about her life. We’re the winners as well in this delightful tale.

At age 20, Diana decided to become a pilot. The Brooklands Flying Club provided instruction for £3/hour and she worked diligently to solo with an investment of only £18. (Most people needed at least nine hours.)

Diana celebrated her 21st birthday in Paris with this, her first Bentley. This and other images from Spreading My Wings.

Diana says her 21st birthday Paris trip in 1939 included chaperoning her father and “his most beautiful Rumanian girlfriend.” Also involved was her father’s dinner with Ettore Bugatti and her birthday decision whether to choose a French Talbot Darracq sports car or a Park Ward 4 1/2 –Litre Bentley. A Cotal pre-selector gearbox plays a role too.

A Supermarine Spitfire XXI, a late-war version, Diana’s 241st Spitfire flight.

In 1941, Diana was one of the first women to qualify for the Air Transport Auxiliary, pilots ferrying military aircraft throughout the British Isles, typically flying in any weather, sans radio and navigational equipment. ATA policy was not to engage the enemy, and flying without ammunition certainly encouraged this.

A Hawker Typhoon fighter, one of Diana’s ATA close calls.

Diana and other ATA pilots had harrowing adventures. She recounts a delivery flight of a Hawker Typhoon fighter in which the lower portion of its fuselage disintegrated. “I glanced down, horrified to see the ground between my legs and feet. No floor! There were the Typhoon’s control wires and plumbing, but nothing else.”

A normal Typhoon’s stall speed was 88 mph; her damaged craft’s, more like 230. Diana landed with flaps up, used all of the runway, taxied to the delivery area—to be asked by the duty airman, “Miss Barnato, why are you bringing us only half an aeroplane?”

Diana reckons she flew more than 135 types of aircraft, including this twin-engine Avro Anson often used for taxi-service.

Diana had more than an enthusiasm for flying; she had in-depth technical knowledge of aircraft. For instance, she recounts details of the German V1 doodle-bug, a pulse-jet-powered buzz bomb used to terrorize London as a (only partly guided) missile. When its engine ran out of fuel, the doodle-bug nosed over causing random death and destruction.

Diana cites information learned from Resistance forces that more than 15 percent of these terror weapons blew up on their launch pads. She also reports that RAF pilots in sufficiently fast aircraft would pace a doodle-bug, tuck a wingtip under the missile’s stubby wing and tip it over. Alas, German intelligence got wind of this and rigged trip wires under the doodle-bug’s wings to counter this maneuver.

From partying in Paris with her father’s Rumanian beauty to dodging doodle-bugs, Diana led an amazingly adventurous life—and shares it with us all. ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2013