Bill Waterton

William Arthur Waterton, AFC & Bar, GM (18 March 1916 – 17 April 2006) was a Canadian and British test pilot, squadron leader and correspondent for the Daily Express.

[5] Ultimately, he was accepted on a short service commission for the Royal Air Force (RAF) which was expanding rapidly in expectation of war.

During this period, he amassed a great deal of test flying in devising tactics for Fighter Command based on the actual performance of aircraft in "real life" conditions.

[14] On 19 January 1950, he piloted the CF-100 prototype on its maiden flight, and stayed on as the aircraft proceeded through its company development trials and throughout a United States Air Force "fly-off" competition in May 1950.

[18] Thereafter, Waterton moved back to Canada to his hometown of Owen Sound, Ontario and largely led a life out of the public eye.

Knowing that a crash would put back seriously the development and production he decided to land the aircraft despite having at his command an ejector seat and parachute.

After the crashed aircraft came to rest, fire broke out and Waterton found great difficulty in freeing himself owing to a jammed "hood.

By then the flames had reached the area of the cockpit but despite this, he climbed back into the fuselage and salvaged the automatic records relating to the original aerodynamic and structural failures.

Although covering a broad overview of the aerospace industry in the 1950s and 1960s, James Hamilton-Paterson exhaustively profiled Waterton's career in the recent, Empire of the Clouds: When Britain's Aircraft Ruled the World (2010).