Document Type
Newsletter
Publication/Presentation Date
11-2026
Reflection
Having experienced very hot and dry weather this summer and more recently very wet and windy weather as Storms Austen and Boelo moved across the country, autumn has arrived with glorious colour that is beautiful to behold.
In this newsletter, we are saying ‘goodbye’ to Ron Cox aged 101 and Roy Lightfoot aged 100, who have recently ‘Handed in their Logbooks’. As far as I know, Ron and Roy were the last remaining 5BFTS cadets who experienced life at Riddle Field first-hand. Our condolences to their families. More about Ron and Roy in ‘In Memoriam’.
In May, I was at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Arcadia FL on Memorial Day to remember the 23 cadets who are buried there. Thanks to work done by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), we were able to honour them in the renovated British Plot which was admired by all those present. We were also able to share the link to the biographies of these 23 young men, written by Chandler Mock and Renny Lloyd Prhys, which are now uploaded to the 5BFTS Digital Archive. The British Memorial Day Service is focused on the 23 cadets who lie there, and now we think about all those who were at 5BFTS Riddle Field and are no longer with us. But we also remember all those cadets who were at any one of the six BFTS and I laid a poppy cross for them.
This time last year, I was preparing to travel to Mesa in Arizona to join with 4BFTS as they remembered their cadets on Remembrance Sunday. And this year, in October, we held the event, “WW2 Wings Across the Atlantic” in Edinburgh. Marking 85 years since the first British RAF cadets were sent across the Atlantic to train as pilots and earn their ‘Wings’, sons and daughters of those at 1 BFTS, 2 BFTS, 4BFTS and 5BFTS joined together to share friendship, stories and experiences. The various BFTS Associations talked about having a joint reunion in the 1980s and 1990s, but never managed it. It’s good to think that all these years later, we have actually succeeded in making it happen. Well done to all concerned.
There is information about these events and more later in the newsletter so please keep reading!
‘Their efforts to preserve the freedom of the world were not in vain
and will never be forgotten.’
Scholarly Commons Citation
Harding, J. A. (2026). 5 BFTS Association Newsletter No. 35 - Autumn 2026. Retrieved from https://commons.erau.edu/bfts-clewiston-newsletters/34
