Alan Bristow

Alan Edgar Bristow, OBE, FRAeS (3 September 1923 – 26 April 2009), founded one of the world's largest helicopter service companies, Bristow Helicopters Ltd, which prospered primarily in the international oil and mineral exploration and extraction industries, but also spread into search and rescue, peacekeeping and other fields.

Born in Balham, south London, on 3 September 1923, Alan Bristow was raised first in Bermuda, where his father Sydney was in charge of the Royal Naval Dockyard, and later in Portsmouth, England, when his father was promoted. At Portsmouth Grammar School Bristow was a contemporary of the author James Clavell, who remained a lifelong friend and wrote a book, Whirlwind, about one of Bristow's riskier exploits.

After World War II broke out, on his 16th birthday in 1940 Bristow joined the British-India Steam Navigation Company as a deck officer cadet. He twice had ships sunk under him: the SS Malda, by Japanese warships in the Bay of Bengal on 6 April 1942; and the SS Hatarana by the German submarine U-214 on 18 August 1942. He was present at the evacuation of Rangoon and the Operation Torch landings in North Africa. Bristow was credited with shooting down two Stukas from the forepeak of an ammunition ship off the coast of Algeria.

In 1943, Bristow joined the Fleet Air Arm as a trainee pilot. Trained by the RAF in Canada, he was trained on the Fairchild Cornell and North American T6 Harvard. In 1944, he was sent to Floyd Bennett Field, New York to learn to fly the difficult Sikorsky R-4 helicopter, the world's first mass-production military helicopter.

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