Sir George White - Businessman not Pilot

Make sure your volume is on: "...he just didn't leap into things..."

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I think that 1909 was a critical year because, again, historians have tended to say he went to France, he saw the Wright brothers flying, he had a kind of a road to Damascus conversion to aviation, came back to England and said I'm going to set up an aviation company. To which his fellow businessmen in Bristol said You're mad. Certainly the last bit of that story is true but I think the first bit is quite wrong, because one only has to follow his career to see that he never did anything precipitously, all his business ventures were carefully planned, carefully financed, carefully set up, he just didn't leap into things. I think it's perfectly clear that from October 1908 meeting, through to February 1910 when he announced the opening of the company that he was planning on setting it up, financing it, getting it sorted, so that when it opened it was immediately on track and successful.