Wing Commander William  Hoy AFC DFC 1-38A

During the early post-war years, the  College flew a variety of aircraft named “Aries” on a series of long-range and record-breaking flights. Hoy joined the college as an instructor in June 1955, coinciding with the arrival of a specially modified Canberra PR 7, “Aries V”.

In June 1956 Hoy took the aircraft on a series of flights in West Africa, studying the problems of flying at very high altitude near the tropopause (the boundary between the dense atmosphere around Earth, known as the troposphere, and the stratosphere) in equatorial latitudes. He then flew the aircraft direct from Dakar to his base in Lincolnshire, a distance of 2,760 miles.

A year later he made his record-breaking flight from Tokyo. The aircraft had been flown to Japan on May 23 1957 by another crew from Cranwell in an elapsed time of 19 hours. After just two hours on the ground, Aries V, flown by Hoy and his crew, took off for Fairbanks in Alaska, where they refuelled before heading for the North Pole on a direct flight to London. They landed after a flight of 4,211 miles, the longest ever record attempt by a RAF jet aircraft at that time. The total elapsed time for the 8,000-mile flight from Tokyo was a few minutes short of 18 hours.