Lieutenant Commander Donald Macqueen MBE Royal Navy

Lieutenant Commander Donald Macqueen (sic), who has died aged 89, was Britain’s most experienced decklanding control officer and a pioneer of air charter holidays.
Donald Robert Macqueen (sic) was born on November 12, 1920: after his father, a Birmingham haberdasher, when Donald was aged 4, he was educated at Russell School, Croydon. He joined the Navy as soon as he could as a Naval Airman Second Class, and after initial training at HMS St Vincent, Gosport he learned to fly at Elmdon, Birmingham and at Worthy Down, where fellow pupils were Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier. He recalled riding pillion behind Olivier to supper at a cottage which he and Vivienne Leigh had taken.
He was at the cinema in Coventry on the night that the city was blitzed and left the theatre to help fight fires all night.
Macqueen flew Swordfish with 823 and 810 Naval Air Squadrons, from the carriers Glorious, Illustrious, Ocean, Vengeance and Theseus and took part in the lead-up to Operation Ironclad, the capture in 1942 of Diego Suarez, when he bombed ships and shore targets, dropped dummy parachutists, and later flew air support missions for the attacking forces.
Macqueen had suffered a numbers of minor decklanding accidents in the Swordfish, but after 845 Naval Air Squadron formed at Quonset Point, he mastered the Grumman Avenger and the Chance Vought Corsair. The Corsair, with its restricted view and unique inverted gull wings and large diameter propeller, was notoriously difficult to fly, and known to the Americans as the ‘Ensign-killer’ or the ‘Bent-wing bastard’.
However, Macqueen found his role in the air world after was appointed as a decklanding instructor – or batsman – , in January 1943, when he started to teach new pilots how to land on deck. Macqueen batted hundreds of new pilots on Airfield Dummy Deck Landings (ADDLs), showing by his signals, and using his favourite bats, young pilots to go up, down, left, right, faster, slower, steady as you are, and sometime giving a wave-off signal telling a pilot to fly round again because he had his approach so wrong.
Occasionally when a low flying aircraft threatened to come too close, Macqueen had to jump to safety in the nets below the flightdeck. Once his missed and fell 40 feet into the sea, but was quickly picked up by a following destroyer.
Despite the stress and responsibility for the lives of others which Macqueen bore, his batted signals to the pilot had a graceful calm as he coaxed each aircraft into the right flight path to hit the deck and be arrested by its tailhook on the flightdeck wires. This calmness was belied by Macqueen’s vitriolic oaths as he commented on the pilot’s performance.
Between 1943 to 1946 he taught over 1,000 pilots, the largest number of ADDLs in one day being 775, but the total number of accidents was a remarkably low – just 11. One pilot, faced with a tricky landing in a new type of aircraft on the heaving deck of a carrier, recalled his relief when he learned that Macqueen was the decklanding control officer or DCLO.
Macqueen was awarded the MBE in 1946 for his services to aviation
Later he was DCLO instructor in 768 NAS at Eglington, near Londonderry and in 1950-51 senior DCLO of the carrier Vengeance. By the time he folded his bats for the last time on January 10, 1952 he had batted more than 66,000 decklanding by day and by night and by nearly 50 types of aircraft. He kept meticulous records of the names of the pilots and the squadrons with whom he had worked.
After staff appointments ashore and a spell as personal pilot to the Flag Officer Air Home, Macqueen weighed the advantages of promotion and more time at sea against separation from his family and decided to retire from the Navy in 1960. From 1963-67 he worked as general sales manager for Britannia Airways, then as managing director of Air Broking and served on the board of Skytours. In 1967 he joined Clarkson Holidays as aviation director where he selected and procured the company’s aircraft. Later he was a founding member of the Tour Operators Study Group and a member of the council of ABTA, and a member of the consultative committee which oversaw the development of Heathrow and Gatwick.
In 1968 he was appointed a chevalier of the Order of Leopold II of Belgium for his services to tourism and the gold medal of the city of Ostend in 1970. In 1975 he set up an aviation consultancy when he continued to advise government departments on aviation and tourism at home and aboard.
He took an active part in local politics in Surrey, served several terms as a Conservative councillor, and was deputy mayor of Waverley, but fell out with the party and got himself re-elected as an Independent. He was also a trustee of the Redgrave Theatre.
Macqueen who died on September 1, 2010, married his WRNS, Angela Margaret Lock in 1953, when his best man was Lieutenant Commander “Tan” Tivy, who had played a vital part in the hunt for the Bismarck. Angela survives him with their daughter and two sons.