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Nevill VintcentOBEDFC (1902 – 29 January 1942) was a South African aviator and airline founder. He was the son ofCharles Vintcent, a South African cricketer.
Nevill Vintcent, a South African, born in 1902, enteredOsborne in 1916, proceeded to theRoyal Naval College,Dartmouth, and served inHMSTemeraire for a few months during theGreat War. In 1920 he went to theRoyal Air Force College Cranwell with the first course, was commissioned in theRAF in 1922, and served inKurdistan,Transjordania,Egypt, andIraq, where he won the DFC in unusual circumstances when he, with a brother officer, had made a forced landing in hostile country. To enable his co-pilot to fire the guns of the aeroplane and beat off the attacks of Arab horsemen, he carried the tail of the aeroplane on his shoulder, and throughout a prolonged engagement swung the aircraft into position for firing until help arrived.
For a time he served as a pilot at the RAFAeroplane & Armament Experimental Establishment (A&AEE) atMartlesham Heath. Convinced of the great future of civil aviation, he left the RAF in 1926 and engaged in air survey work inIndia,Burma, theFederated Malay States andBorneo, and he flew the firstair mail from Borneo to theStraits Settlements.
In 1928 he, with a partner, undertook one of the early long-distance pioneer flights, when they flew twode HavillandDH.9 aeroplanes from England to India. For two years he was engaged with spreading the gospel of aviation in India, and his contact with Mr.J.R.D. Tata, of Tata Sons Ltd, gave birth toTata Airlines.
Nevill Vintcent andJ.R.D. Tata together pioneered the air mail service from London to the sub-continent. On 8 October 1932, anImperial Airways aircraft flew from London toKarachi. J R D Tata, in ade Havilland Puss Moth took the mail on toBombay, where Nevill Vintcent then took over for the leg toMadras, arriving on 16 October. The first westbound flight leftMadras the following day.[1]
On 25 February 1935 Vintcent made an inaugural flight from Bombay toNagpur toJamshedpur and on toCalcutta with ade Havilland Fox Moth. They built one of the two air transport companies which, before the 1939-45 war, built the foundation of air transport in India, and during the war rendered invaluable assistance to the RAF in operating scheduled air transport services and in such operations as the carriage of troops to Iraq, the evacuation of women and children fromHabbaniyah, and later fromBurma.
For his work in the organization of air transport in India he was made anO.B.E. in 1938. The approach of war in Europe impressed upon Vintcent and others the strategic need for an aircraft factory in India, and thereafter to that end his mind and activities were more and more concentrated. In 1940, simultaneously with the Government of India's decision to establish theHindustan aircraft factory atBangalore with American assistance, Vintcent visited theUnited States andEngland and obtained the promise of a contract for the construction of training aircraft in India as an initial programme for the Tata aircraft factory. Shipping and other difficulties, however, delayed the building, equipping, and manning of an aircraft factory in India. But in 1941 Vintcent flew to England at the request ofLord Beaverbrook, thenMinister of Aircraft Production and obtained a contract for the construction of troop-carrying gliders, and set about the organization of the company and the building of the factory atPoona.
Vintcent, anxious to lose no time, set out on his return to India on 29 January 1942. With the irony of fate, of all the numerous personnel who were sent to India by air and sea to establish this enterprise, he alone was lost on the way out. The outbreak of war with Japan revealed how invaluable an established aircraft industry in India, even on a small scale, would then have been; but it was too late for India to make any contribution in the production of aircraft. The Tata aircraft factories as well as the Hindustan aircraft factory were switched over to the repair and overhaul of aircraft for the air forces.
In 1942, Vintcent set out on a flight toIndia to put into effect a plan for which he had fought long and tenaciously - the establishment of an aircraft factory inIndia. TheRAFHudson in which he had been given a place in the crew to expedite his return disappeared without trace after taking off from a Cornish aerodrome. While officially there was no further information, it is known that other RAF aircraft were attacked by enemy aircraft in the mouth of theEnglish Channel that day, and among his friends it was presumed that Vintcent was shot down in that vicinity.