SUSAN OTTAWAY spent a total of nineteen years working for Lufthansa, Kuwait Airways and Saudi Arabian Airlines both in passenger services and as a load controller. More recently she has been working in publishing as a freelance editor, mostly editing, proofreading, producing plate layouts and compiling indexes for military history titles. She is the author of eight books: Dambuster: a Life of Guy Gibson VC (1994), (with Jackie George) She Who Dared: Covert Operations in Northern Ireland with the SAS (1999), Violette Szabo – The Life That I Have (2002), Hitler’s Traitors (2003), Fire Over Heathrow (2008), Guy Gibson VC: The Glorious Dambuster (2009) - a heavily revised and updated edition of Dambuster, The Wind Beneath My Wings (2011) and the bestselling Sisters, Secrets and Sacrifice (2013). She is now retired and lives in Hampshire.

Susan after her second Harvard flight at White Waltham (2025).

IAN OTTAWAY (Susan's brother) spent twenty years as a cartographer with the MoD, producing maps, charts and geographic data. In 1997 he left to pursue a career as an IT consultant. He has been passionate about aviation from a very early age, flying whenever he can. To date he has flown in over forty different aircraft types and is always keen to increase that total, taking the controls whenever permitted! He has enjoyed aerobatic flights in historic aircraft including a Tiger Moth, Chipmunk, Stearman, Bulldog and Spitfire, a parachute jump at Sibson Aerodrome many years ago and in 2011 he tried wing walking with Aerosuperbatics at the wonderful old airfield of RFC Rendcomb in Gloucestershire. He is now retired and lives in Oxfordshire.

Ian "at the controls" of one of the most beautiful airliners ever built, the Vickers VC10. The photo on the left was taken on August 2nd 1967 in a BOAC aircraft at Heathrow and the one on the right was in the Sultan of Oman's former aircraft G-ASIX/A40-AB at Brooklands on November 22nd 2006.

Wingwalking aerobatics on a Stearman at RFC Rendcomb

Enjoying a flight in Paul Green's Chipmunk at White Waltham.

Pulling over the top of a loop with Craig Kellar in Thom Richard's T-6 at Kissimmee, Florida.

Satisfying a lifelong ambition to fly in a Spitfire, the wonderful ML407 then owned by the late, and much missed, Richard Grace at Sywell.

The two authors a few years ago ... well OK ... nearly sixty years ago!!