David Morgan MBE 1923-2004

The Guardian, Tuesday 9 March 2004

David Morgan, who has died aged 80, was one of the last members of that generation of daredevil British test pilots who, emerging from the second world war, used their skills to move from the era of piston-engined aircraft to that of jet propulsion. Much of his work took place on the Vickers Supermarine Swift, Britain’s first swept-wing fighter, and he later tested the Scimitar fighter-bomber.

It was a time marked by the glamour of jet flight – highlighted every year at the Farnborough air show – which spilled over into the cinema. Indeed, one of the Swifts that Morgan flew, renamed Prometheus, took part in David Lean’s The Sound Barrier (1952), with Morgan at the controls. At the time, the Swift was competing with the Hawker Hunter, which was also capable of breaking the sound barrier, for the frontline fighter role with the RAF.

Morgan was born in Heanor, Derbyshire; after his parents moved to London, he was educated at University College school. Barely 18 when he volunteered for the RAF in 1941, he was turned down on the grounds of poor hearing – he had been shooting at Bisley – but was passed by the same doctor six months later.

His first solo flight was on a Tiger Moth biplane in July 1942, and his training was completed in South Africa. He was stationed for a time at Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire, home of the 617 Dam Busters squadron. He flew, unofficially, on some of their raids on V1 flying bomb launch sites. In 1944, he was transferred to the Fleet Air Arm (FAA), flying Seafires, the naval version of the Spitfire, and later served on the escort aircraft carrier HMS Stalker in the Indian Ocean.

After the war, he became a flying instructor. Once, while testing one of the last of the 20,000 (piston-engined) Spitfires to be built, his controls failed, and he climbed out on the wing with the intention of baling out. After looking down, he changed his mind, climbed back in again, and succeeded in landing safely – only to be rebuked for indecisiveness. The rule was that the pilot was more important than the aircraft.

In 1949, Morgan was one of four FAA pilots who flew a formation of piston-engined Hawker Sea Fury fighters non-stop from Heathrow to Malta in 3hr 23min. He also first test-flew the Vickers Super-marine Attacker, the navy’s first carrier-borne jet. Then, in 1950, he joined Vickers Supermarine as a test pilot.

In July 1952, he set a record of 18min 21sec by flying a prototype Swift from London to Brussels, at an average speed of 667mph. On another occasion, the engine cut out on his Swift as he was approaching the company airfield at Chilbolton, Hampshire. He skimmed inches below some power lines, dodged a farm and made a wheels-up landing in a stubble field. The farmer’s wife was mollified when Morgan apologised for having demolished her outside lavatory with a wingtip, and he joined the workers for tea.

Morgan’s worst moment, he said, was plunging into cloud when about to make a fast, low-level pass at the 1954 Farnborough show; his best was sitting waiting on a sunny day for clearance in a Scimitar at Wisley, in Surrey, to make a full-power climb, knowing that in four minutes from releasing the brakes he would be at 45,000ft. Like the Swift, the Scimitar could dive supersonically. It could also attack with atomic devices, and Morgan did most of the test flights for the shortlived technique of “toss bombing” with nuclear weapons.

As for the Swift, despite his efforts the Hunter was preferred by the RAF. The Swift entered service in 1954, only to be withdrawn the following, to return later as a low-level reconaissance aircraft.

His greatest disappointment, he said, was never having flown the British Aircraft Corporation’s tactical strike reconaissance aircraft, the TSR2, before the Labour government cancelled it in 1965. He had designed its “navattack” system and was its project pilot.

Morgan then became a BAC salesman based in Singapore, selling Rapier missiles there and to Australia, Brunei and Indonesia. His old friend Bill Bedford (obituary, October 22 1996), one of the test pilots on the Hunter, was, by then, based in Indonesia selling Hawk jet trainers. Morgan had continued to appear at air displays, his Spitfire engaging in mock dogfights with Bedford’s Hawker Hurricane.

He was made an MBE in 1985, and retired to a farm on Dartmoor in 1988. He kept up his private pilot’s licence, and, last July, gave his third wife, Catherine, whom he married in 2002, a flight in a Russian Yak aerobatic aircraft.

She survives him, as do a son and two daughters from his first marriage, and a son from his second.

· David William Morgan, test pilot, born April 15 1923; died February 3 2004