Diana Barnato Walker
1918 - 2008

Diana Barnato Walker was one of the great women pilots. She was the only British woman on record to fly, at the controls of a Mk IX Spitfire, over the Channel into occupied Europe during the second world war.

Volunteering for service in September 1939, she delivered 260 unarmed Spitfires from factories to RAF airfields between 1942 and 1945.

Her logbooks reveal that she also flew Gladiators, Beaufighters, Hurricanes, Mosquitoes, a Swordfish, a Walrus, an Avenger, Mustangs, Typhoons and Mitchell bombers. The Spitfire was her favourite, and indeed, Barnato Walker, named Diana after the Roman goddess of hunting, came to personify that beautiful and effective fighter as much as any of the litany of aces.

In a famous photograph of her climbing aboard a Mk IX Spitfire at RAF Hamble, Hampshire, in May 1945, dressed in her trademark fleece-lined Afghan shepherd's leather jacket, woman and machine make a perfect pairing. She last took the controls of a rare, twin-seat Spitfire trainer when she was 88 - "impolite not to," she said.

On August 26 1963, Barnato Walker became the first British woman to break the sound barrier, taking an RAF Lightning jet XM996 from RAF Middleton St George, Co Durham, to Mach 1.65.