{"id":8266,"date":"2012-03-28T08:26:16","date_gmt":"2012-03-28T07:26:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=8266"},"modified":"2012-03-29T09:28:41","modified_gmt":"2012-03-29T08:28:41","slug":"the-death-of-a-hero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=8266","title":{"rendered":"The death of a hero"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In 1984, my first and only book was published. It was a biography of my wife&#8217;s father, the World War II Czech night intruder ace <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk.html\">Karel Kuttelwascher<\/a> and it was called &#8220;Night Hawk&#8221;. While doing picture research for the book at the Imperial War Museum, I came across a photograph of an aircraft called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/Spitfire.html\">&#8220;The Darlington Spitfire&#8221;<\/a>. In view of my family name, i was intrigued by the picture, bought a copy, and had it framed for my study.<\/p>\n<p>The photograph showed a Canadian pilot in the cockpit of the aircraft. Later I researched the history of &#8220;The Darlington Spitfire&#8221; and found that many different pilots had flown it. One of the British pilots was\u00a0Roy Flight who\u00a0was her regular pilot at 118 Squadron over a period of two months. She carried him into battle on a total of 26 operations, never failing to bring him back unharmed. For details of these flights, check\u00a0out <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/Spitfire.html#PART%205\">the end of Part 5 and all of Parts 6 &amp; 7<\/a> in my essay.<\/p>\n<p>I have now learned that this week Roy Flight died in his adopted country of New Zealand. He was 90 and suffered from pancreatic cancer. I salute him and send condolences to his family ands friends.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 1984, my first and only book was published. It was a biography of my wife&#8217;s father, the World War II Czech night intruder ace Karel Kuttelwascher and it was called &#8220;Night Hawk&#8221;. While doing picture research for the book at the Imperial War Museum, I came across a photograph of an aircraft called &#8220;The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8266"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8278,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8266\/revisions\/8278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}