After the war he was selected to be a member of the British Wakefield Cup team, a prestigious aero modelling competition held that year in Akron, Ohio.

Piggott joined the Royal Air Force in 1942 as aircrew and made a first solo in a de Havilland DH.82A Tiger Moth after only six hours dual.

After a short conversion to the Airspeed Horsa, General Aircraft Hotspur, and Waco Hadrian, he was posted to India and then on to Burma where he flew Douglas Dakotas dropping supplies to front-line troops.

Back in the UK, he was posted as a Staff Instructor at the Central Flying School at RAF Little Rissington where he trained instructors and flew North American Harvards, Boulton Paul Balliols, Avro Athenas, Gloster Meteors, Supermarine Spitfires, de Havilland Mosquitos, and Avro Lancasters.

Flying with an ATC cadet as co-pilot in the national gliding championships, he established a British two-seater altitude record, in a T.21, climbing to over 17,000 feet (5,200 m) in a thunderstorm over Sheffield.

In 1953, Piggott received the Queen's Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air for work on developing and introducing new instructional techniques for gliding in the ATC.

In 2003 at the age of 81, he completed a 505 km (314 mi) task in a Fedorov Me7 Mechta glider with only a 12.7 m (42 ft) span in a national competition in a time of 7hr 14min.

He made a successful emergency parachute descent from a damaged SZD-9 Bocian making him a member of the Caterpillar Club.

The director had placed a flock of sheep next to the bridge so that they would scatter as the plane approached in order to demonstrate that the stunt was real and had not used models.

In Darling Lilli, he was responsible for the majority of the designs of six replica aircraft and for supervising their construction in a period of nine weeks.

For one of these TV programmes a replica of the Sir George Cayley's first heavier-than-air flying machine was built in the early 1970s.

The machine was flown by Derek Piggott at the original site in Brompton Dale in 1973 for a TV programme[6] and again in 1985[7] for the IMAX film On the Wing.

The system is installed in all new gliders built by DG Flugzeugbau[8] Piggott died of a stroke, aged 96, on 6 January 2019.