Magnificent man and his flying machine • Orkney Crofts - The best self-catering accommodation in Orkney.

It was Tuesday, 8 May,1933 and Captain Ernest Fresson was taking off on the first scheduled flight in the Highlands – from Inverness, via Wick, to Kirkwall, establishing what would become the longest continuously-operating scheduled air service in
Europe and probably the world.

Scouting out his routes in his little Gypsy Moth, he prepared the ground – and the air – for Highland Airways, which he established with help from the Inverness motor engineers Macrae & Dick. Fresson's ability to get mail and passengers through in all weathers became a byword. "He was a highly-skilled pilot and a determined businessman who adopted the north of Scotland and stuck with it, right through very acrimonious times," said Morgan.

The foggy weather which threatened that first flight, as well as the hazards of flying those fragile early aircraft, returned to haunt last Thursday's 75th anniversary celebrations, when the planned flypast over Inverness was transferred to Orkney because of predicted fog.

Just over a year after that historic flight to Orkney, he inaugurated the UK's first scheduled airmail service on the same route and went on to open up many other Highland and island routes now taken for granted.

He is also credited with the concept of Britain's first Tarmac runway, at Hatston, Orkney. By the Second World War, his airline had become part of the early British Airways and after the war it was nationalised, along with other domestic air services, into British European Airways.