Lindsay Cumming 1929-2007

He volunteered for "weapons trials" with the RAF in Australia and in 1956 he was senior flight commander in No 76 Squadron, flying Canberra bombers through the rising atomic bomb mushroom cloud to collect samples. He took part in Operation Mosaic, the initial testing of the UK's atomic bomb on the Monte Bello islands, before further nuclear tests at Maralinga, in the Southern Australian desert. In 1957, he moved to Christmas Island in the Pacific to take part in Operation Grapple 1, the testing of the UK's first H Bomb. This required sampling at maximum altitude and flying battle formation at 55,000ft. During this period he received the maximum permitted dose of radiation.

He then went on to take up a seemingly less hazardous occupation as a sales/demonstration/test pilot for Shorts Brothers. Nevertheless, in 1971, he was with the Nepalese royal family when the queen was shot in a hunting accident. The British ambassador described the incident as follows: "Cumming was required to evacuate her majesty from the camp back to Kathmandu some 300 miles away, at dead of night, with no navigational aids and with what I understand to have been a 30 per cent risk of never getting through at all. At the best of times, this is a tricky country to fly in. On top of that, Cumming was required to accept an enforced altitude limitation, which he knew to be positively unsafe, because of the queen's condition. Despite these very severe handicaps, he succeeded in bringing his aircraft through by dead reckoning to an airport which has no night flying facilities as if the whole operation was being carried out under ideal circumstances in broad daylight." The king of Nepal had a special silver medal struck and awarded it to the three members of the crew.

Lindsay Logan Cumming was born in 1929 in Dunblane, Perthshire. At his prep school, Hurst Grange, he won seven cups on his final sports day. He won a scholarship to Glenalmond in 1943, where he continued to excel at sport. He spent his National Service in Kenya as an officer in the Royal Engineers before studying civil engineering at Edinburgh University. He joined the University Air Squadron, surviving a crash in 1952 when he flew a Chipmunk into telephone wires on the approach to Turnhouse Airport. He won the Trevelyan Scholarship in mathematics in 1950, graduated in 1952 with a first-class honours degree and joined the RAF. From his university days, he was a regular on the Cresta Run at St Moritz, making the RAF team and winning a number of individual awards, including the Stagni Cup in 1954 and the Coppa D'Italia in 1958. He was also in the RAF ski team. He was awarded a "Green Endorsement" in 1955 for "night recovery of a Canberra following a full runaway of the tailplane actuator", a situation that demonstrated his quick thinking and calmness in a crisis. Following two years as a flying instructor on Vampires at Linton-on-Ouse, he was promoted to squadron leader in 1960 and posted to command the Queen's University Air Squadron, in Belfast. Attendance at the RAF Staff College in 1963 was followed by staff duties as personal staff officer to the commander-in-chief of Far East air force, in Singapore. Cumming returned to the MoD in London in 1966, but he hated "flying a desk" and left the RAF in 1968, joining Shorts Brothers as a sales/demonstration pilot. After two years flying Skyvans in Africa, the Middle and Far East, he was promoted to test pilot in 1970 and to chief test pilot in 1976. During this time, Cumming made a significant contribution to the development of the Shorts commuter aircraft, the SD3-30 and the 360. He flew the Shorts 360 on its maiden flight and the first production aircraft C-23A Sherpa. One of his tasks at Shorts was the regular ferrying from Scotland to Northern Ireland of all the explosives needed for the warheads of Shorts' missiles, known as the "Schweppes Run". He regularly flew at both the Farnborough and Paris Air Shows. In 1984, aged 55 and after 16 years with Shorts, he retired