THE snarl of the General Aircraft Monospar's engines merged with a shrill of bagpipes and the cheering of onlookers as the twin-engined monoplane bumped along Inverness's Longman airstrip before taking to the air and banking into an inauspiciously cloudy northern sky.
It was Tuesday, 8 May,1933 and Captain Ernest Fresson was taking off on the first scheduled flight in the Highlands – from Inverness, via Wick, to Kirkwall, establishing what would become the longest continuously-operating scheduled air service in
Europe and probably the world.
As well as several passengers, he was carrying parcels of The Scotsman, the first time the paper had been delivered to Wick or Orkney by air. A consummate pilot and old-fashioned barnstormer who flew his aircraft and his business ventures by the seat of his pants, he was launching his pioneering Highland Airways.
The foggy weather which threatened that first flight, as well as the hazards of flying those fragile early aircraft, returned to haunt Thursday's 75th anniversary celebrations, when the planned flypast over Inverness was transferred to Orkney because of predicted fog.
Earlier in the week, a 78-year-old de Havilland Gypsy moth biplane crashed near Perth on its way to the commemoration. Thankfully, no-one was hurt. In the event, however, Fresson's original Gypsy Moth DH 60 Moth G-AAWO, and a larger twin-engined de Havilland Dragon of the type used by Highland Airways, led six other aircraft in salute over the site of Orkney's original airstrip at Wideford, where a cairn was unveiled by Stephen Hagan, the convener of Orkney Islands Council.
Not only did the Dragon fly low over the assembled crowd, but Nigel Reid, owner and pilot of Fresson's own Gypsy Moth, also touched down and taxied up to the memorial, before taking off again. "It was an emotional occasion," said David Morgan, a trustee of the Fresson Trust, a charity which preserves his memory and offers bursaries to people from the Highlands and Islands pursuing aviation careers.
On board the biplane once flown by his father was Fresson's son, Richard, a one-time RAF pilot, who declared the flight "marvellous. It was real flying."
The cairn is topped with a bronze model of a de Havilland Rapide, a development of the Dragon that became the workhorse of these air routes. A similar bronze will top a commemorative wall to be unveiled on 18 June at the former Longman airfield site at Inverness, where hangars still stand in what will become known as the Fresson Business Park. The bronzes, by Orcadian sculptor Gary Gibson, were donated by Loganair. The present Highland Airways (related in name only) Eastern Airways and other local businesses have contributed to the costs of the anniversary.
Back in May 1933, The Scotsman reported that the Monospar was named "Inverness" by the provost's wife, Mrs MacDonald, who duly broke a bottle of whisky over one of its propellers, declaring that the flight "opened up a mode of transport which brought remotest parts of the country to their door".
Fresson, who grew up in Surrey and Essex, trained as an engineer and worked in China, but trained as a pilot with the embryonic Royal Flying Corps during the First World War. After the war, he returned to China, where he designed his own plane – which almost had him summarily executed when he demonstrated it to a prospective buyer, a warlord, and it didn't take off as fast as promised.
When civil war broke out in China in 1927, he returned to Britain and ran a flying circus, touring the country, and in Caithness he was approached by two businessmen who asked if he could fly them to Orkney.
Scouting out his routes in his little Gypsy Moth, he prepared the ground – and the air – for Highland Airways, which he established with help from the Inverness motor engineers Macrae & Dick – and, of course, The Scotsman contract. Fresson's ability to get mail and passengers through in all weathers became a byword. "He was a highly-skilled pilot and a determined businessman who adopted the north of Scotland and stuck with it, right through very acrimonious times," said Morgan.
Just over a year after that historic flight to Orkney, he inaugurated the UK's first scheduled airmail service on the same route and went on to open up many other Highland and island routes now taken for granted.
He is also credited with the concept of Britain's first Tarmac runway, at Hatston, Orkney. By the Second World War, his airline had become part of the early British Airways and after the war it was nationalised, along with other domestic air services, into British European Airways.
Despite his inestimable contribution to air communications, the maverick flyer was given a miserly pay-off in March 1948 – something which left him deeply embittered. He was still piloting a light aircraft, however, two years before his death in Inverness, in 1963.
