Quotes About RAF

I met Richard Burton, an RAF cadet on a two-term course. I would have flirted more enthusiastically if it had not been for the horrid boils on the back of his neck.

My education was paid for by the RAF Benevolent Fund, so a charity school, run like an orphanage, with uniforms and beatings. It was tough, but it got me to Cambridge - like being a chrysalis suddenly becoming a butterfly.

My mother was a stay-at-home mum and my father was an RAF pilot.

It was the rootlessness that went with being the son of an RAF officer that shaped me. I had been to 11 schools by the time I was 9.

The most decorated service rabbit in history was RAF Navigation Officer Danielle 'Thumper' Rabbit, who ejected from a Tornado over Iraq when it was hit by a surface-to-air missile. She wrote about her time as a POW in Bouncing Out of Tikrit, and it was quite a good read, although critics did find fault with the overlong detail of Iraqi salad in the latter part of the book.

I once met an RAF pilot who told me of what he called a "bird strike". This, rather unfairly in my view, made it sound as if it was the bird's fault; as if the little feathered chap had deliberately tried to head-butt twenty tons of metal travelling in the opposite direction at just under the speed of sound, out of spite.

My dad was in the RAF, so we travelled quite a lot. My memory's not the best - I remember we lived in Belgium for a bit - but I grew up in a village called Compton in Newbury.

As much as he loved to fly, in the prewar years he regarded his RAF aircraft more as a tool for cracking open English high society than as a weapon for defeating Britain's enemies.

There was class distinction in the RAF, as there was and still is in British society as a whole. It was said, for example, that a regular officer was an officer trying to be a gentleman, an auxiliary was a gentleman trying to be an officer and a VR was neither trying to be both.

Dresden, which I am told presents no military or industrial targets whatsoever for the RAF.