Ex-para is still flying high as charity fundraiser

But ex-paratrooper Jeffrey Long, 87, for whom retirement definitely does not mean taking it easy, is also a student pilot.

And yesterday he was trying to cure a friend’s phobia of flying by taking her for a whirl. Before leaving Sherburn-in-Elmet airport in the Piper four-seater, landlady Louise Johnson, who runs the Old Glen House pub in Baildon, said the trip would either “kill or cure her.”

Happily an hour later, after flying over York Minster, she returned unscathed.

The trip has raised more than £400 for the Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund, which provides welfare support to serving and ex-RAF and their families.

It is just the latest of many ventures by Mr Long, who had raised around £300,000, with a series of gruelling challenges over the past decade, which started when he was 75 with a “very tough” walk from London to Lausanne in 39 days.

Mr Long, who was made an MBE for voluntary service to the Royal British Legion in 2009, says he often gets mistaken for someone younger and still has lots of hair which needs a cut every couple of weeks. “I don’t feel my age. I look at people and think, ‘jeepers creepers’ at the state of them and they are younger than me.”

Mrs Johnson has only been on two planes before, one as a child and most recently to Prague. Despite taking a tranquilliser, she was so scared on the way back that she was clutching her partner’s arm – and that of the man on her other side. It was her suggestion on the spur of the moment to try flying with Mr Long. “He is an inspiration,” she said. “How he keeps going at his age I don’t know.”