At the beginning of 2006, my youngest son, William (who was then aged 10), realised that I was under some pressure to get all the research material for the British South American Airways book together and in some sort of order so that writing could begin in earnest. My sister and I had explored as many avenues as we could to unearth information about the airline, by talking to former members of staff, sifting through archive material and gathering together information from the thousands of pages of documents relating to BSAA at the National Archives in Kew.

One thing we hadn't done was to explore the internet in depth to see if there were any contacts to be made or useful information to be gathered from that source. William asked me if there was anything he could do to help me with the book, so I suggested he could take a look on the internet for anything which looked interesting.

I returned home from a very long day at work in early February 2006 to be greeted by William, who was very keen for me to come into the study and look at my PC. Apparently he had arrived home from primary school and sat straight down to search for BSAA material on the internet. After some hours not only had he located a vast number of references to the airline but he had produced a document listing each URL and giving a brief description of the content! As if this wasn't enough, over the next couple of days he found a stunning photograph of a BSAA Lancaster (Star Watch) which he incorporated in his own design for the front cover of the book. Susan and I were so pleased with William's book cover and the Lancaster photograph that we tracked down the source of the photo and it now graces the cover of the first edition of the published book.

So, thank you William, for your hard work and for the inspiration for the book cover!

Ian Ottaway - September 2007

William's original cover design :-

Copyright © 2006 William Ottaway