Bob Davy

As a child obsessed with aviation - and absolutely desperate to be a fighter pilot - Bob read with hunger and expectation, every work of fact or fiction and every autobiography of fighter pilots from WW2 and after. And yet he still didn’t know how to start a Merlin engine in a Spitfire, which rudder pedal to push during the take off run, how to use a gun sight to shoot down the enemy, how to land. ‘Technical’ novels were not the thing then.

All that changed when Patrick O’Brien’s novels about Napoleonic sea battles rose to fame, climaxing in 2003 when Peter Weir’s epic film, derived from the books, Master and Commander, took the world by storm and changed Bob's life.

He has since built a reputation for ‘putting people in the cockpit’ when describing the many aircraft that he had flight-tested for aviation magazines. He decided then and there to write a series of novels about fighter pilots in WW2 and beyond; to explain what it was like to fly and fight during this, the most important era in human history.

He used the life of Robin Olds as a template: he served as a fighter pilot in P38 Lightnings and P51 Mustangs in WW2 and later on F4 Phantoms in Vietnam.

As part of the preparation for In Case of War Break Glass (Olds’ personal strap line) he flew a Spitfire. As a result of the success of the first book he had the opportunity to fly Robin’s very own P51 Mustang and became a close friend with his daughter Christina.