Captain Eric Brown: Much-decorated Naval officer who hunted U-boats and became regarded as the world's greatest test pilot

He was to fly 487 different types of aircraft and make 2,407 aircraft-carrier deck-landings, both still world records

Brown (dark uniform) with fellow test pilots; in all he flew 487 different types of aircraft

On a remote airfield in Germany, 10 days after the end of Hitler's Reich, a 26-year-old British aviator shot into the sky on a secret flight in a rocket. Eric “Winkle” Brown, who would become the Royal Navy's chief test pilot and Britain's Deputy Director, Naval Air Warfare, recalled: “I was completely fascinated by ... their tiny – and lethally dangerous – rocket fighter, the Me 163, and had an overwhelming desire to fly it... my desire became an obsession, which I realised would not be requited except by a clandestine operation.”

He had to instruct his German ground crew at Husum, Schleswig-Holstein, to be discreet about their duties, because the British C-in-C Germany had issued orders to British forces banning any use of dangerous German rocket fuels. “Only RAE [Royal Aircraft Establishment]-accredited pilots were exempt,” Brown wrote, “but this position was likely to change... So it was virtually now or never.”

Brown, one of the RAE elite, and a veteran of fighter patrols, convoy duty and hundreds of deck-landings at sea, had been appointed to investigate German air technology as Commanding Officer Enemy Aircraft Flight. It was just the job for a man who, as a teenager visiting the 1936 Berlin Olympics, had been inspired to fly by the German air ace Ernst Udet, and had thrilled to the skill of gliding champion and future test pilot Hanna Reitsch.

Born in Edinburgh, his father a member of the Royal Flying Corps, Brown attended the city's Royal High School, then studied German at Edinburgh University. On a student teaching visit to Germany in 1939 when war broke out, he was arrested, then expelled, by the SS. He joined the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm, which noted his talents and made him a test pilot.

Now, in the chaotic conditions left by the war's end, Brown – who in the Me 136 “Komet”, with all rocket fuel expended, glided back to Husum airfield unscathed – also wanted to explore German advances into jet propulsion technology. So when the chance arose for him to interrogate the captured Luftwaffe chief Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, the two talked jets; and with a newly caught and identified Reitsch, Brown discussed rockets.

That professional kinship of fliers from aviation's mid-20th century “golden age” did nothing to diminish Brown's horror at the evils of Nazism. Thanks to his fluent German he had been one of the first on the scene at the Belsen concentration camp after British troops liberated it in April 1945, and he shrank from Goering's, and Reitsch's even more fanatical, loyalty to Hitler.

Back home, his hopes of high-speed flight progress were to be thwarted by shocks of another kind. He was the pilot designated to trial the experimental British Miles M52 jet, but as it neared readiness in 1945, to his dismay, “the British government instructed the Miles company to hand over every detail and drawing of the M52 to a visiting American delegation”. The US cancelled an expected reciprocal visit from Britain, during which their research would have been revealed, and the following year the Ministry of Supply stopped the M52 project. “ No satisfactory reason for this decision was ever given,” Brown lamented. “Certainly the Americans were the beneficiaries.”

Brown's own career continued; he was to fly 487 different types of aircraft and make 2,407 aircraft-carrier deck-landings – both still world records. He had been decorated so much that on being appointed OBE in 1945 he was greeted by King George VI at Buckingham Palace: “Oh, you again.” In 1948 he made the first landing of a twin-engined jet – a Meteor – on a British carrier, HMS Implacable, and in 1951, when attached to the US Naval Air Test Centre at Patuxent River, he broke the sound barrier in a US Sabre.

It was a long way from his early service, returning after U-boat hunts in a piston-engined Martlet to catch the unreliable arrester-wires on the tiny platform of the converted ex-merchantman HMS Audacity, the sinking of which while escorting convoy OG 76 in December 1941 had tipped him into the drink and brought him his first decoration, the DFC. Fellow fliers gave him the traditional Fleet Air Arm nickname “Winkle”, for his diminutive height, 5ft 7in.

After the war Brown pioneered “flexible deck” landings on rubber, for which he won the Boyd Trophy in 1948. He was promoted Commander in 1953, and in 1958 led Britain's Naval Air Mission to Germany, this time taking with him his wife, Lynn, whom he had married in 1942. The couple had a son, Glenn.

Brown had an enthusiastic patron in Admiral of the Fleet Sir Caspar John, First Sea Lord 1960-64, who earlier, as a ship's captain, had facilitated some of Brown's deck-landing “firsts”. Brown, who in his whole aviation career counted only 15 crashes – including one that put him in a pond faced by an angry black bull – was promoted Captain in 1960, and in 1964 returned to Germany as Britain's Naval Attaché. In 1965 he escorted the Queen on a state visit, and became ADC to the Queen in 1969.

Brown finished his naval career as commander of the Royal Naval Air Station, Lossiemouth, being made CBE and retiring in 1970. He then worked for civilian helicopter associations, British and European, and wrote an autobiography, Wings on My Sleeve (2006). The astronaut Tim Peake paid tribute to him as “the greatest test pilot who has ever lived.”

In 2014, when his native Scotland voted on whether to leave the UK, he warned that independence would make both it and England less secure, and in 2015, in Germany, he spoke out as the Queen visited Belsen during a state visit: “I am so glad that the Queen has come here. This is all about reconciliation. It is telling the Germans and particularly the younger generation of Germans that they have no part in this. They do not have to feel guilty. Her visit was long overdue.”

Eric Melrose Brown, pilot: born Edinburgh 21 January 1919; DSC 1942, MBE 1944, OBE 1945, AFC 1947, CBE 1970; married 1942 Evelyn (Lynn) Jean Margaret Macrory (died 1998; one son), partner to Jean Kelly Brown; died 21 February 2016.