User:Monique Agazarian

Monique "Aggie" Agazarian was a member of that relatively small band of women who were recruited by the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) during the war, to help deliver aircraft from the factories to the squadrons. It was a job requiring versatility since the ATa pilots were required to fly everthing from light trainers, through high performance interceptor fighters to four-engined strategic bombers. But Monique Agazarian came of a family which had aviation in its veins. As a child, her favourite "toy" had been a first world war Sopwith Pup fighter, which her mother had bought at an auction for $5 and installed at the bottom of the garden. It was a favourite plaything for Monique and her four brothers, one of whom became a second world war fighter ace.

Monique was the daughter of a French mother and an Armenian father who had met in London in 1911. She went to the Convent of the Scared Heart, Roehampton, and a finishing school in Paris, followed by a stint at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Soon after the start of the second world was she became a nurse at RAF Uxbridge. But flying was becoming an obsession. When the ATA was formed specifically to ferry new aircraft from the factories to the saqudrons, thereby to relieve the pressure on service and factory pilots, some of the volunteers for it were women who already had civil licences. Among them was the famed Amy Johnson who parachuted to her death in ice-cold water when the aircraft she was delivering ran out of fuel over the Thames estuary in January 1941.

Monique Agazarian was not a qualified pilot but, after pestering the ATA for almost a year, she was accepted for pilot training during September 1943. After being taught to fly she was very soon being entrusted with high performance aircraft such as the Spitfire (always her favourite), the Mustang and the formidable Hawker Typhoon ground attack fighter which weighed almost six tons. agazarian made her last wartime flight in a Seafire (naval Spitfire), swooping low over Knightsbridge where her mother had a flat.

Her brothers, too, had played their part in the war in different ways. Jack joined the Special Operations executive and undertook a number of missions in France. After some narrow escapes he was captured by the Gestapo and, though horribly tortured, maintained a heroic silence to the end about the considerable store of knowledge he possessed. He was shot by the Gestapo at Flossenburg, Bavaria, six weeks before the end of the war. His is one of SOE's unsung stories of heroism. Noel had fought throughout the Battle of Britian as a Spitfire pilot with 609 Squadron, shooting down six enemy aircraft. Hethen went to North Africa with a Hurricane squadron, No 274, and had a total of 71/2 kills confirmed and three aircraft damaged by the time he was himself shot down and killed on MAy 16, 1941. Another brother, too, flew with the RAF>

After the war "Aggy" gained a professional pilot's licence and joined the newly-formed Island Air Services, flying boxes of flowers from the Isles of Scilly to the mainland. Then the company obtained a contract to fly people on joyrides from the public enclosure at Heathrow airport. With captain Ray Rendall she eventually took over the company. For a number of years they were married but Monique always used her maiden name in aviation. The company expanded its activities, flying passengers to deauville in eight-seat de Havilland Rapide aircraft and giving joyrides at air dispalys up and down the country. It was not uncommon for them to fly more than 800 joyride passengers in a single day. However, the growth in airline traffic at Heathrow made it impossible to integrate joyriding activities with scheduled flights and at the end of 1957 the company ceased operations.

For the next seven years she lived in Lebanon where her husband was an airline captain with Middle east Airlines. On her return to england, Monique resumed flying on charter operations and in 1973 she joined the late Graeme Percival who ran an instrument flying school. Together they pioneered an interesting pilot training concept. An instrument flying simulator was installed in a bedroom leased at the Grosvenor Hotel, Victoria. It was surrounded by a circular wall, painted on the inside to represent a horizon, blue sky, a few clouds and various ground features. Student pilots were given tuition in the simulator which "flown" visually, using the painted wall as a reference. After ten or so hours the trainees went to Biggin Hill airport where, for the first time, they were strapped into a light aircraft and told to take off, climb, level out at prescribed height, turn left and right, then descend towards the airfield. The experiments indicated that considerable cost-savings could be achieved by conducting early training in a simulator, something the major airlines have more recently come to recognise.

Monique Agazarian continued giving flying and instrument training until last October. She is survived by her three daughters.

Reference: The Times Tuesday, march 9, 1993