1. Captain Ted Fresson

Among the many notable pioneering pilots of Scottish Aviation, it is the visionary Captain Ted Fresson, that is among the most impressive for me. He established the first domestic air services connecting the remote Orkney Islands with the mainland in 1933, using the aeroplanes of his newly formed Inverness based company, Highland Airways. Unlike other airline services that were starting to appear at the time, his venture was not backed by, or formed out of the existing and established large transport companies. He was a sole pioneer and built up Highland Airways from next to nothing.

In the beginning, all he had was the use of a Gypsy Moth, a modern (for the time)
but still open cockpit biplane that was slow but at least dependable and an ageing
Avro 504 WWI surplus biplane, allied with an incredible vision and
determination to succeed.

Fresson had surveyed the far north during his time as a barnstorming pilot, looking for new territory in which to spend a summer season performing aerobatics and
giving people their first, exhilarating taste of the air in an open cockpit
aeroplane.

Operating so far north in the WWI era Avro biplanes, with their unreliable rotary
engines, was in itself an ambitious undertaking at the time, but it was his vision
and audacity in establishing the first commercial airline in these remote areas
of Scotland that revealed the scale of his true ambition.

His airline venture connecting the Highlands and Islands had a huge impact on the
region and a statue of him that commemorates his achievements, now stands at Inverness airport, which he established over seventy years ago.

From the fledgling Orkney service, came routes connecting Shetland, Wick, Thurso, Aberdeen and even Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, as well as later routes connecting the Highlands and Argyll with Perth and Glasgow.

Fresson faced stiff competition from the rival Aberdeen Airways, coming a year later
and run by the ambitious Eric Gander Dowar, who went on to establish the modern-day airport at Aberdeen and become an MP. The two companies were fierce rivals on the Shetland routes in the years before World War II and the competition between them did much to speed the development of reliable airline services throughout the whole of Scotland.

It is Fresson, however, with his tenacity and single-minded vision, and perhaps his
old-fashioned sense of adventure and fair play, that I find the more interesting of the two. He achieved what many at the time said was impossible, with only modest support and in some cases, even active opposition from local investors with interests in the ferry services with which he would be competing.

In the early days, while he was establishing the service and doing much of the
flying himself in the Airline’s new GA Monospar, a small twin-engine passenger
aeroplane, he managed to achieve an almost one hundred percent record in all
weathers, into airports that were little more than borrowed or leased farmer’s
fields, cleared of boulders and stone dykes and all without the help of the
modern weather forecasting or navigational aids we benefit from today.

Introducing new Radio Let Down approaches in 1934 made life a little easier, but reading a description of the rudimentary nature of the procedure and the conditions in
which they were employed in Fresson’s autobiography, ‘Air Road to the Isles,’ makes my toes curl, today:

“The radio station simply brought the aircraft overhead by a series of Wire Telegraphy bearings (using Morse Code), or Radio Telephony if no radio officer was aboard. After that, the pilot had to find his own way down and on to the airfield……”(Great!) “ ……with practice we got extremely accurate with the let-down and could get into our airfield with cloud a few feet off the deck and with visibility a few hundred yards or so.”

            This was an amazing feat of skill when you consider that this is as good and in many cases batter, than the results we can achieve today and that is by using much more sophisticated and reliable Instrument Landing Systems, Radar procedures and increasingly, Satellite GPS approaches. Fresson established not only these ‘modern’ methods of recovering to the home airfield and the routes flown, but many of the sites
that are now busy Highland and Island airports and which the people of the region have come to rely on for everything from goods and mail, through to business and holiday travel, not to mention life saving medical evacuation flights. Fresson was the first to recognise and then capitalise on the opportunity for air travel in these remote fringes of the British isles, and from his arrival in the region onwards, their once very real remoteness became a thing of the past.

Highland Airways later became part of United Airways in 1935, formed out of a merger between Highland and the west coast based Northern and Scottish Airways, though the two continued operating services under their own names. As WWII approached, Fresson acted as an advisor to the Air Ministry which continued throughout the war, identifying the best sites to establish the many satellite fields needed for the war effort.

The nationalisation of United Airways in 1947 with the other airlines of the UK,
into what became British European Airways, left Fresson bitter and disillusioned following his treatment by the government, having being effectively evicted from the organisation along with the other founders of the privately run regional airlines, without compensation. He moved to Kenya almost in disgust, but returned home to Inverness in the 1950s and continued to show his independent spirit by flying private charter around the Highlands with his own aircraft.

He died in 1963 and although the last chapter in Ted Fresson’s involvement with the Airline which he created is a sorry end for such a key figure in the development of civil aviation in the UK, it is fitting that he should return to the Highlands and back to the simple charter services with which he had begun; back to that independent and self-reliant flying that had made him in the first place.