Veteran pilot reunited with aircraft of love

It was more than 60 years ago when aviation enthusiast Alan Bickley took to the skies to shuttle between the Midlands and Scotland for a relationship that was to span the decades.

Mr Bickley would regularly fly his two seater Piper Cub aircraft from Pendeford airfield to a landing strip near the Dundee home of wife-to-be Isobel during their long distance courtship.

And now the father-of-four, of Alexandra Road, Penn, has said it is a “dream come true” to have been reunited with the aircraft which he had last flown in October 1948.

Mr and Mrs Bickley met, in Scotland, in May 12, 1945 while he was stationed at Arbroath before serving as a pilot with the Fleet Air Arm, in Ceylon, formerly Sri Lanka.

He returned home to Wolverhampton in 1947 and soon afterwards his father George paid £600 for the Piper Cub, an American Air Force spotter plane built in 1943 that is now worth over £22,000.

It was immediately commandeered by Mr Bickley, now aged 86, to ensure romance blossomed with Isobel and he made the regular flight north of the border.

“I regularly flew up and down to Scotland a lot in it. She was the first passenger I carried in it and the last.

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