Archie Boyd

Wing Commander Archie Boyd, who has died aged 95, flew during the Battle of Britain and was later one of the RAF’s most successful night fighter leaders.

Archibald Douglas McNeill Boyd was born in Sheffield on June 20 1918 and educated at Harrow, where he was a sergeant in the OTC. At Trinity College, Oxford, he joined the University Air Squadron and learned to fly before cutting short his studies on the outbreak of war to join the RAF.

In March 1943 Boyd was given command of No 219 Squadron, with the task of preparing it for an unknown destination overseas. After re-equipping with the latest night-fighter version of the Beaufighter, and with a new air intercept radar, the squadron was ready to depart at the end of May. Led by Boyd and his long-serving navigator, Alex Glegg, 18 aircraft headed for an airfield in Cornwall before leaving at five-minute intervals on the long flight across the Bay of Biscay to Gibraltar.

Operating from Bone in Algeria, the squadron was ready for action by the end of June, and two days later Boyd opened its account by shooting down two Junkers 88 bombers.

As the Axis forces were driven out of North Africa, No 219 moved to Tunisia to provide escorts for the convoys supporting the invasion of Sicily. Towards the end of August, Boyd shot down another Junkers 88.

Following the advance into Italy, the squadron covered the landings at Salerno and provided an aircraft at constant readiness against German intruders attacking rear areas.

During this period Boyd and Glegg shot down two Heinkel 111 bombers — the second of these, on September 18, being the final success for No 219 in North Africa.

In the late 1950s Boyd delivered Eva Peron’s private Vickers aircraft to Argentina, undertaking an extraordinary flight via Iceland and Greenland, then down the east coast of the United States and across the Caribbean, before the final leg south across the Amazon.

After leaving Vickers in 1961, he joined Richardsons Westgarth as chief executive, spending the remaining 25 years of his career with the company until his retirement in the early 1980s.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10770863/Wing-Commander-Archie-Boyd-obituary.html