Don Attlee commanded the Queen’s Flight and on a route checking flight prior to the Queen’s visit to Ghana in 1961, had an his crew were arrested with the aircraft in Mali, the first time such an occurrence had happened. The situation was eventually resolved and the Royal Visit passed without incident. Attlee had been a flying instructor during the final years of the war and later served on two Canberra bomber squadrons. As the senior RAF intelligence officer in Germany, he was on a routine visit to Berlin in April 1966 when a Soviet fighter aircraft crashed into a lake in the British sector of the city. He was involved in the dramatic recovery of its engine and top secret radar, which were rushed to England to be analysed. The engine was returned to the wreck, but not the radar, which the British claimed had been unrecoverable from the lake. In his final appointment he organised the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Review of the RAF.

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