Julian Firth: aviator, adventurer, style aficionado
Bringing a design classic back to life

Julian Firth is an unusual mix: a man of action and a fan of great British design. But when you see the kind of design he loves – that cool modernist style from the 50s and 60s – it all makes sense. This was an era when men of action looked sleek and stylish (and so did their aircraft).

For Firth it all started early. At just three months old he was taken for a ride in a DC-3. This is the classic banana republic cargo plane, the kind you can imagine dropping onto mountain airstrips to pick up illegal shipments. ‘It’s a real design icon, all polished aluminium and big propellers and manual controls,’ says Firth. ‘There’s something really magical about that.’

The magic clearly stuck. Firth has spent his adult life flying for a living, as much of it as possible in planes designed and built in the decades after World War II.

‘I think the early and mid-60s was just an incredible era to be alive,’ he says. ‘This was an era when things were happening extremely quickly, technologically and also culturally and stylistically.’

The iconic 1950s airliner

His favourite plane of all is the DC-6 – the Douglas DC-6A. It was first built in 1946 as a military transport and then adapted to become the iconic 1950s airliner, with the sleek looks of a modern design classic.

A 1950s Delta airlines DC6 interior

So what’s it like to fly? ‘Oh it’s fantastic,’ he says. ‘The controls are completely manual so it has direct feel. You can sense everything about the aircraft.’

Firth is currently having a famous DC6, ‘G-APSA’, meticulously restored for a new venture offering what he calls ‘aerial voyages’. G-APSA will be available for private charter to destinations worldwide, for business or pleasure.

Firth (right) with G-APSA

Firth (right) and his crew

‘If you want to go and join the Orient Express in Venice then you can come with us and have an immersive experience in a 1950s airliner,’ says Firth. ‘We can fly at low level, so you can go right between the mountains, you can see the villages and the coast.

‘If we were chartered to support an expedition then we could change the interior to give half the aircraft for passenger accommodation and the other for their gear, be it a boat or a 4×4 or canoes, motorbikes, or whatever else.’

The restoration will return the plane to its original appearance, but with the addition of some new equipment and a cabin with a luxurious (but historically appropriate) interior created by a yacht and aircraft interior design house. Firth is aiming for what he calls ‘beautiful high 50s style’. The crew’s uniforms will include Sunspel clothing.

Timeless, not old fashioned

The style (and ethos) Firth admires most is ‘timeless rather than old-fashioned’. It’s what attracts him to Sunspel. He and his crew began wearing Sunspel polo shirts in 2008 and found them not just very comfortable but hard wearing, with a style that matches their operation.

‘Sunspel is rooted in a really fascinating history, but it’s aware of its place in the present,’ he says. ‘Like the DC-6, it takes you right back to James Bond, JFK and that moment of supreme national confidence at the threshold of the 60s. An era of people with style, people with a real sense of themselves.’

People with a real sense of themselves. It’s an interesting phrase, and it suggests an awareness of personal style combined with something more, a matter of character and values. Firth himself has had his character tested in extreme situations, although he’s a little reluctant to talk about it.

‘That’s a terrifying thing to hear’

With a bit of arm-twisting, he says there were one or two hairy occasions when he thought he’d bought it. ‘One time we’d just got airborne, full of fuel so quite heavy, and as we lifted off the control tower told us we had smoke and flame coming out of the righthand engine.

‘Then one of our company pilots who was on the ground in a different aircraft called us and said, “You’ve got a 15-foot flame coming out the righthand engine and the first four feet is bright sparks.” Now that’s a terrifying thing to hear, because part of the engine is made from magnesium and that burns with very bright sparks. And you can’t put the fire out. Magnesium will just burn until all the material (and the wing) is gone.

‘And,’ he says matter of factly, ‘that typically means you lose the aircraft.’

The crew carefully carried out their standard procedures but the fire warning kept sounding. They believed they’d had it. ‘It was definitely frightening, but it wasn’t panic so much as racking my brains thinking, “Why hasn’t it worked? What have I done wrong?” And there was the genuine sense of “blimey, it’s all over”. It wasn’t a sense of doom or anything like that, it was just like… Bugger!’

Yet actually the procedures they’d followed to the letter had worked. The fire eventually went out, the plane just about kept above the ground, and they made it back to the airfield – just.

‘The pilot who’d been watching this from the ground, he was flying one of the aircraft that did VIP work, so he reached into its onboard bar and brought over a bottle of brandy. We sat in the cargo hold drinking that till it was empty.

‘There’s two ways of approaching things,’ concludes Firth. ‘Whenever things get tough you can either dwell on how tough things are or you can try and do something about it.’

It’s an attitude straight out of that era he feels such an affinity with. For him, style is more than fashion. It’s an expression of an attitude to life.