Ron Burrows

Ron Burrows grew up in the Vale of Evesham in the heart of England. He spent the first half of his professional life in the Royal Air Force, first as a fighter pilot, then as a flying instructor, and finally as a fast-jet test pilot testing Cold War aircraft including the Harrier ‘jump-jet’ and the supersonic, swing-wing Tornado. In his twenty years of test flying, he rose to become the chief test pilot at the UK’s experimental flight test centre at Boscombe Down.

After leaving the RAF, he became in turn the principal of a post-graduate flight-test engineering school then the vice-principal of a city further education college. Since retiring from full-time employment in 2003, he has been a magistrate, a hospital director, a charity director in Tanzania, and a health-service company chairman.

Ron Burrows launched his writing career in 2007 with his successful debut novel, An American Exile, an adventurous tale set in 1750s England and America. This is the story of Jack Easton, a Portland stonemason who is transported to America for a crime he did not commit and then seeks to bring to justice the corrupt official who set him up. An American Exile was followed by Fortune’s Hostage (2009) and The Road to Fort Duquesne (2012), which continue Jack Easton’s adventures into the French-Indian War.

‘Finding April’ (2024) is his fourth novel, a WW2 story of a young man who starts out life as a coal miner but goes on to distinguish himself as a flight engineer flying the Manchesters and Lancasters of RAF Bomber Command. It is the flame he carries for his first, but lost love, April, that eventually drives him to set out on a quest to find her again.

His test-flying memoir ‘Cold War Test Pilot’ (2021) is an exciting, witty, and very readable account of the thrills and spills encountered during his fast-jet flying career.