This book is predominately a history of two very different ferrying organisations — the war-time Ferry Command and the post-war Silver City Air Ferry across the Channel.
The author was a member of the original Air Service Department of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and was in charge at Gander and Bermuda until called to Montreal as Operations Controller of‘ATFERO’ when the ferry organisations had been taken over by the British Ministry of Aircraft Production.
When R.A.F. Ferry Command took over from ‘ATFERO’ Taffy Powell was appointed Senior Air Officer to Air Chief Marshal Sir Frederick Bowhill and he remained in charge of operations until Victory in Europe.
He is therefore in the unique position of being able to set down for the first time, the full history of R.A.F. Ferry Command.
Following the war, the author pioneered the development of Air Ferries between Britain and the continent and FERRYMAN tells the story of ‘Silver City Air Ferries’. In 1948 Silver City carried 178 cars and their passengers and went on, within ten years, to carry more than 200,000 cars and three quarters of a million passengers.
The Heroines of the story are perhaps the 16 fat and rather ungainly Bristol Freighter aircraft which, day after day, crossed the Channel without mishap, and gained for the Company the Cumberbatch Trophy, the premier air safety award of the Commonwealth. FERRYMAN fills a gap in the history of both military and civilian aviation.