ALMOST half a century after he plunged to his death, aviation pioneer Ernie Brooks is doubly to be remembered.

A biography will recount the story of a magnificent man and his flying machine – a 30mpg gyrocopter that cruised at 80mph, climbed at 750ft a minute and sold for just £1,150 – while an exact replica is being restored by his nephew, just 13 when he watched his uncle killed at Teesside Airport.

The hope is formally to unveil it on March 9 next year, the 50th anniversary of Ernie’s death.

Trevor Brooks, not only been promised an apprenticeship but his own gyrocopter when old enough to have a pilot’s licence, idolised his uncle – just 39 when he plunged to his death.

“It was quite daunting for such a young kid and his death has haunted me ever since,” he says. “I want to give him the recognition I believe he deserves. I’ve even made a replica helmet.”

Ernie was a garage owner from Tudhoe Colliery, near Spennymoor, had spent seven years developing the Brooklands Mosquito and was close to opening a factory in the town.

A Canadian consortium headed by musician David Marden – lead singer of Jack London and the Sparrows, who morphed into Steppenwolf – had promised more than $1m dollars in development support.

“I’m convinced that it will be the automobile of the future,” wrote Marden.

Ernie was prematurely bald and self-conscious about it. The photograph of him test-piloting a Crown Topper – wig and a prayer – over Weston-super-Mare has become familiar, his payment a wig of his own. Crowning glory, it seemed.

Trevor, the proudest of nephews, is rebuilding a Mosquito – many of the parts Brooks originals – at a secret location in the Spennymoor area and has amassed thousands of photographs and records from Pathe News to Blue Peter, Daily Mirror to Down Your Way.

One photograph shows the craft fitted with what appear to be two bazookas. “There was quite a lot of military interest,” says Trevor.

He’s been much helped by Shirley Jennings, a Cornish gyrocopter enthusiast who discovered a Mosquito in a cellar, found an original engine on e-Bay and is writing the biography.

“The engine was buggered,” says Trevor, reflects and decides that perhaps the description wasn’t sufficiently strong.

“Absolutely buggered,” he adds.

Already the reborn Mosquito looks handsome, right down to the original colours – “Apollo green and Ford diamond white” – and the original Esso advert on the tail.

Though it’ll start, it’s unlikely to fly, however. Trevor doesn’t think they’d get the necessary clearance.

“Uncle Ernie was a pioneer, 50 years ahead of his time,” he says. “I’ve always been fascinated by the story, but with the help of Shirley and the internet it’s really coming together.”

It’s hoped that the unveiling of the “new” Mosquito will take place at the airport, with a coach laid on to take Ernie’s Spennymoor area contemporaries.

Trever has no doubt that, while the Brooklands Mosquito may not get off the ground, the commemoration will. “It’s a wonderful story. How sad that it came to such an abrupt and terrible end.”

ANOTHER fascinating character now takes time’s winged chariot and enters the Ernie Brooks story. He’s Adolf Schima, an Austrian who was third in the figure skating in the International Workers’ Winter Olympics in 1931.

What about the workers? The alternative Olympics had first been contested in 1923, when just four nations were in action, in the belief that the formal Olympics too greatly represented the upper classes (and were none too keen on women, either.)

Competitors entered as individuals, all beneath the red flag, the event lasting until 1937.

Schima – known to friends as Dolf and in a 1960 newspaper cutting simply as Mr A Schima – had been interned in the UK during the war, became coach at Durham ice rink and in his spare time was building a 21ft wingspan French Turbulence glider at his workshop in North Road, Durham, working with Ernie Brooks.

“There’s not a screw or a nail in the aircraft, everything is glued,” he told the papers.

In retirement he moved to West Cornforth, where Trevor tracked him down. “I just knocked on his door one night, it was very emotional,” he says.

Adolf Schima’s story sounds fascinating. Can anyone add to it?

LAST week’s column recorded what was said to be the last lecture by Duncan Bythell, much celebrated in the dales, but wondered if there might be something of the Sinatra about him. Before the thing had left the presses, there was an email from the Swaledale Museum. Dr Bythell will be back on his feet in October.

THE Rt Rev Helen-Ann Hartley, newish Bishop of Ripon and the first woman bishop to come through the Church of England, led the service at Barton a couple of Sundays back.

As might be supposed of someone who daily tweets her pilgrim progress, she talked of evolving times, recalled the elderly joke about how many Anglicans it takes to change a light bulb.

“Change...?”

Her background’s ecumenical, her father a Church of Scotland minster before becoming a CofE priest in the Diocese of Durham, she herself educated at a Roman Catholic secondary school in Sunderland. She’d become a bishop in New Zealand in 2014, just eight years after ordination over here.

The Ripon area embraces western North Yorkshire, Barton about as far north as episcopally it’s possible to go before tumbling into the Tees. St Cuthbert’s thought the occasion so important they’d not only put up a gazebo, but hired a netty, too.

The superlative-strewn tweets talk enthusiastically of wanting to get her wellies dirty, visits from Leyburn auction mart (“fantastic”) to Mainsgill farm shop (“great”) on the A66.

And Barton? “Absolutely wonderful,” said the bishop, and the feeling appeared wholly mutual.

ONE of the most obvious differences between the church in England and New Zealand, said Bishop Helen-Ann right at the start of her sermon, was the amount of red tape which here seemed to surround its mission and ministry.

Three days later in Middleton Tyas, part of the same group of parishes, a handsome plaque was dedicated in memory of Flying Officer Peter Pease – a member of that prominent Darlington and Richmond family – who died heroically in the Battle of Britain.

“Insufficiently remembered by history,” said Prof John Oakley, the American academic who funded both that one and a second at Kingswood, Kent, over which Pease, 22, was killed.

The Middleton Tyas plaque was neither in the church, where originally they’d hoped it might be, nor in the surrounding churchyard where he lies, but on private land nearby.

About half a dozen villagers attended; the church was unrepresented.