Wartime RAF navigator who later flew with BOAC before becoming a co-founder and director of Virgin Atlantic Airways in the 1980s
After a wartime career as a wireless operator/air gunner and, subsequently, a navigator, Eric Holloway joined the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) and flew with the airline in its postwar operations on, successively, piston-engine, turboprop and finally jet airliners until 1963.
After a period on air traffic control he returned to flying with Laker Airways where he became the Chief Navigator until the company went bankrupt in 1982. He then joined up with a number of entrepreneurial spirits to form an airline that was to become Virgin Atlantic Airways, funded by Richard Branson, in 1984.
Reginald Eric Holloway was born in 1921 the son of a self-made businessman who owned most of the stalls on Northampton Market. His father believed in hard graft rather than formal education, and he left school at 14 for an apprenticeship as a printer, a trade from which in 1940 he escaped by joining the RAF. As a wireless operator/air gunner he flew several sorties in Wellington bombers over Europe before in 1943 being posted to Egypt. This led to a period of operations in North Africa after which Holloway with his crew were sent to India from where they flew maritime patrols and bombing raids against the Japanese.
Back in the UK in 1944 he converted to Sunderland flying boats and was trained as a navigator. He returned to the Far East theatre, flying maritime patrols with 230 Squadron against Japanese shipping until the end of the war when he was involved in repatriating prisoners of war. In 1946 he was offered a permanent commission in the RAF, but decided to leave and, after a short period as a management trainee with an engineering company in Rugby, joined BOAC. This involved operating flying boat routes from Southampton Water until 1950 when BOAC retired its flying boats. Holloway next found himself navigating Avro York freighters — one notable delivery was that of five baby elephants from Bangkok to Heathrow for Billy Smart’s Circus, an arrival greeted by much publicity.
After navigating Boeing Stratocruisers Holloway converted to the turboprop Bristol Britannia and then the turbojet Boeing 707 until in 1963 BOAC decided it no longer needed navigators and he left the company. After a couple of years in air traffic control at Tripoli, Libya, and at the College of Air Training at Hamble, Hampshire, in 1965 he joined Sir Freddie Laker in his new British independent airline venture, Laker Airways, which began operating its first flights the following year. Holloway became the airline’s Chief Navigator and was instrumental in introducing transpolar flights.
Laker Airways did not have the financial strength to compete against the established scheduled airlines in the recession of the early 1980s and went bankrupt in 1982. Holloway joined three Laker colleagues including the company’s former chief pilot, Alan Hellary, and an American-born lawyer lawyer, Randolph Fields, with the idea of founding a successor to the defunct airline. The initial aim was for flights to the Falklands Islands, where there seemed to be a need for a service in the wake of the war there.
This proved impracticable and instead British Atlantic Airways was formed intending to operate the 380-seat DC10 from Gatwick to Newark, New Jersey. With potential competition from a similar “no frills” operation being launched by an American company, People Express, based at Newark, further funding was sought, and with the financial involvement and funds provided by Richard Branson the airline became Virgin Atlantic Airways in 1984, operating its first scheduled flight between Gatwick and Newark with a Boeing 747 on June 22, that year.
In the early years of the airline’s life Holloway’s input in terms of route planning, performance and documentation was of the highest value. Branson was subsequently to say of him that without it “we would not be where we are today”. Holloway remained with the airline as a director until 1989 when he retired.
Holloway’s first marriage, in 1941, was dissolved and he married again in 1969. He is survived by his wife, by their son and daughter and the son of his first marriage.
Eric Holloway, air navigator and co-founder of Virgin Atlantic Airways, was born on October 22, 1921. He died on January 20, 2011, aged 89
Bomb disposal expert who played a leading role in the development of the Navy’s postwar deep diving effort
As a naval bomb and mine disposal rating, “Uncle Bill” Filer was awarded the George Medal for his part in rendering safe and dismantling a submarine-fired Italian “circling” torpedo on January 15, 1942, which had washed up on the beach at Ras el Tin, near Alexandria.
These weapons were supposed to self-destruct; a similar one had killed the Torpedo Officer of the submarine depot ship Medway in September 1940. It was important to discover its technical secrets and Filer’s team leader, Lieutenant G. H. Goodman, was awarded the George Cross for achieving this. (Goodman was killed by an explosion at a German mine depot on VE Day.) The sobriquet Uncle Bill arose from Filer’s long career as a naval diver and instructor, service with the Admiralty Experimental Diving Unit and as the civilian officer-in-charge of the Diving Trials Unit, amassing 45 years in this often dangerous and always physically demanding occupation.
William Brook Filer joined the Royal Navy as a boy seaman aged 15 from the Barnado’s-run Watts Naval School in Norfolk. At the boys’ training school HMS Ganges he won the prize — £5 worth of textbooks — as the best all-round boy of the year. While in the battleship Nelson his interest in diving was awakened by working the air pump for some “hard-hat” divers at Gibraltar, noting that they were lucratively paid “dip money”. He applied and duly qualified as a diver, doing underwater maintenance on submarines at HMS Dolphin in Portsmouth.
In 1938 Filer responded to an invitation for naval ratings to become pilots in the Fleet Air Arm. After training at Rochester aerodrome and RAF Netheravon, he was awarded his wings as war broke out, becoming the first “flying diver” although not allowed to wear his diver’s badge. He was flying Blackburn Shark biplane torpedo bombers in a training role when ordered back to straightforward naval service. This irritating piece of man management infuriated Filer who lost flying pay and other allowances totalling 50 per cent of his pay packet — and he had recently married.
He next joined the battleship Queen Elizabeth as a Petty Officer Diver. After the withdrawal from Crete, his worst experience was removing the mangled remains of some 360 sailors and soldiers from the cruiser Orion. He also helped to recover hundreds of 15-inch shells from a sunken merchant ship and, after the attack by Italian charioteer frogmen that badly damaged both Queen Elizabeth and Valiant, was charged with inspecting Alexandria’s harbour boom defence nets, discovering large gaps, some “as big as a bus”.
Appointed to the Medway as Senior Diving Instructor, Filer was on board when she was torpedoed by a U-boat on June 10, 1942, a devastating blow to submarine operations at a period seen as the nadir of the whole Mediterranean campaign.
Having been rescued with a couple of Wren cypher officers by the destroyer Hero and returning home for survivors’ leave, Filer qualified as one of the only nine deep divers in the Navy at that time. Promoted to warrant officer, he supervised oxy-hydrogen gas cutting trials down to 120 feet and “no-stop” decompression trials down to 150 feet. He suffered his only case of the “bends” — potentially fatal bubbles of dissolved nitrogen that reappear in the body when pressure is removed too quickly without pauses on the way up — in his shoulder which gave him occasional painful osteo-arthritis for the rest of his life.
The Royal Navy’s new purpose-built diving trials vessel HMS Reclaim was commissioned in 1948 with Filer as technical adviser. After a year ashore on courses he was appointed to her as second-in-command and chief diving officer. One of his missions was the protracted search for the submarine Affray which disappeared on April 16, 1951, because of a fracture in her snort induction mast, drowning all hands including an entire class of young trainee submarine officers. She was eventually found at 290 feet on June 14 near the Hurd Deep and Reclaim’s divers identified her using an experimental camera. Filer was appointed MBE.
Appointed to the Admiralty Experimental Diving Unit (AEDU), he became involved with the development of diving equipment in an era when the Royal Navy’s diving expertise was world-famous. He commanded a diving tender at Port Edgar in Scotland before taking up the job of trials officer at the navy’s diving centre at HMS Vernon, Portsmouth. Here and back at AEDU he was largely responsible for the introduction of the Surface Demand Diving Equipment, suit inflation, efficient neck seals, neoprene mittens, “woolly bear” undersuits, the divers’ underwater communications system, trials of mine radiographic equipment and a series of deep-water trials down to 600 feet using oxy-helium breathing mixture.
Leaving the navy in 1962 as a lieutenant-commander and subsequently in charge of the Diving Trials Unit, Filer’s tenure saw some remarkable advances including phenomenal deep dives to 1,000 feet requiring 88 hours of decompression, different breathing mixtures, the pioneering of saturation diving (where divers make lengthy stays at depth in a chamber to save decompression time) and other techniques which contributed to Britain’s vital offshore oil industry. In retirement he set up a hyperbaric oxygen facility to treat sufferers of various ailments.
His wife, Eileen, died in 2009. He is survived by their son and daughter.
Lieutenant-Commander William Filer, MBE, GM, naval diver, was born on August 6, 1917. He died on January 31, 2011, aged 93
