Nevill Vintcent

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Nevill Vintcent OBE DFC (1902 – 29 January 1942) was a South African aviator and airline founder. He was the son of Charles Vintcent, a South African cricketer.

Early life

Nevill Vintcent, a South African, born in 1902, entered

RAF in 1922, and served in Kurdistan, Transjordania, Egypt, and Iraq
, where he won the DFC in unusual circumstances when he, with a brother officer, had made a forced landing in hostile country. To enable his co-pilot to fire the guns of the aeroplane and beat off the attacks of Arab horsemen, he carried the tail of the aeroplane on his shoulder, and throughout a prolonged engagement swung the aircraft into position for firing until help arrived.

Pilot

For a time he served as a pilot at the RAF

Burma, the Federated Malay States and Borneo, and he flew the first air mail from Borneo to the Straits Settlements
.

India

In 1928 he, with a partner, undertook one of the early long-distance pioneer flights, when they flew two

J.R.D. Tata, of Tata Sons Ltd, gave birth to Tata Airlines
.

Nevill Vintcent and

Madras the following day.[1]

On 25 February 1935 Vintcent made an inaugural flight from Bombay to

Burma
.

Own flight

For his work in the organization of air transport in India he was made an

Poona
.

Vintcent, anxious to lose no time, set out on his return to India on 29 January 1942. With the irony of fate, of all the numerous personnel who were sent to India by air and sea to establish this enterprise, he alone was lost on the way out. The outbreak of war with Japan revealed how invaluable an established aircraft industry in India, even on a small scale, would then have been; but it was too late for India to make any contribution in the production of aircraft. The Tata aircraft factories as well as the Hindustan aircraft factory were switched over to the repair and overhaul of aircraft for the air forces.

In 1942, Vintcent set out on a flight to

RAF Hudson in which he had been given a place in the crew to expedite his return disappeared without trace after taking off from a Cornish aerodrome. While officially there was no further information, it is known that other RAF aircraft were attacked by enemy aircraft in the mouth of the English Channel
that day, and among his friends it was presumed that Vintcent was shot down in that vicinity.

References

  1. Flight Global
    . 14 September 1933. Retrieved 16 September 2011.
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