EVERY minute of the day, every day of the week and every week of the year, somewhere in the world a passenger plane is landing. Seat belt signs will suddenly glow, trays will be stashed away and seats returned to their upright position.

Those next to the windows, after hours above the cotton wool cloud layer, will look out to see the ground below steadily getting closer. The end of their journey is near.

Descending over green fields, rooftops and busy motorways, the plane then crosses the airfield perimeter, skims past the marker posts on the runway and, with a sudden rush, the black tarmac is rising up. There’s a gentle bump as the wheels touch down safely and from that moment on, even the most experienced traveller feels a little easier.

And it’s all due to the work of a group of electronic and aviation boffins, plus one plane in particular, who came together in Worcestershire during the darkest days of the Second World War.

The automatic landing system was just one of the aeronautical advances to come out of the workshops of the Radar Research Establishment at Malvern from 1942 to 1947 and tested on a single Boeing plane which flew out of Defford airfield, near Pershore.

Now the story of that plane and the part it played in the wartime development of radar and other technical gadgetry, much of which has gone on to make peacetime flying much safer too, has been told by author Bob Shaw, of Broadway, in his book Top Secret Boeing.

Mr Shaw is honorary secretary of the Defford Airfield Heritage Group and he claims to lift the veil and provide an insight into what went on in this little corner of south Worcestershire in the 1940s at an airfield he describes as “one of the most secret places in Britain during the Second World War”.

His book tells the story of one of the most unusual but most valuable aircraft at Defford – the unique Boeing 247-D serial number DZ203, the only one of its kind in Europe.

So secret was its equipment and so valuable was the aircraft to the Allies that it was under constant armed guard when on the ground.

The development of Malvern as an electronics research centre began in 1942 when the Telecommunications Research Establishment was moved there, its laboratories and workshops taking over buildings on the campus of Malvern College. TRE, as it was better known, was the main United Kingdom research and development organisation for radio navigation, radar, infra-red detection for heatseeking missiles and related work for the Royal Air Force, both during the war and afterwards.

Over subsequent decades, the facility became known by a series of other initials, including RRE, RSRE, DERA and DRA. Today, it is part of QinetiQ, the international defence technology and security firm.

But back to 1942. When TRE moved to Malvern, it brought with it the Telecommunications Flying Unit, which operated the aircraft to test the boffins’ inventions. TFU took over Defford, which had been, until then, mainly a training airfield.

Mr Shaw said: “From May 1942, an enormous number and variety of aircraft came and went at Defford.

“They took part in radar experiments, mainly using apparatus manufactured in the workshops at TRE, while other aircraft were fitted with radar systems produced in small quantities for operational use.

Almost all these aircraft were military types, mainly from the RAF, but also from the Fleet Air Arm and US Army Air Forces, modified to take radar installations.

“An exception to this plethora of military types was an elderly American airliner, a Boeing 247-D which was given the British serial number DZ203 when it arrived in Britain in 1941, and which then moved to Defford in May 1942.

“This Boeing was intensively used at TFU throughout the war, only to meet its end in circumstances on which accounts vary, in the harsh winter of 1946-47.”

It may seem odd that an obsolete American airliner, the only one of its type in Europe, should have been shipped across the Atlantic at the height of the U-boat threat when shipping space was at a premium, and used so intensively throughout the war for radar research, when so many operational aircraft types were available in Britain.

But there was good reason why the 247-D was sent from America to Britain in July 1941 – specifically because of the radar with which it had been fitted at the behest of the Tizard Mission to the United States.

Thereafter, it was held in high regard by pilots at the TFU and by TRE scientists, who preferred DZ203 for their research flying over all other available aircraft.

“In an outstanding culmination of its service to wartime research, from late 1944 onwards, The Boeing, as it was generally referred to at Defford, was found to be admirably suited to automatic landing trials,” said Mr Shaw.

The foreword to the book has been written by Captain Lloyd Cromwell Griffiths, whose late father Group Captain Frank Griffiths piloted the Boeing from Defford on numerous occasions in the 1940s to test both radar and automatic landing systems.

“The scientists also flew on the aircraft testing their own inventions and displaying the same courage and impatience to make progress that drove on the pilots,”

writes Capt Griffiths.

“My father was a very modest man. He flew many hours at the control of Boeing DZ203 testing and developing the radar that would play such a key role in protecting Britain from the German night bomber and U-boat threats.

“Over those long hours, he developed a harmony with the old Boeing that gave him the confidence and the courage to take his hands and feet off the controls and to watch this ‘singular aeroplane’ gracefully descend in a smooth and stable trajectory to land herself on the runway at Defford. No wonder he felt that this aircraft, above all the many types that he flew, had a real soul.

“Radar and Auto Land have made today’s flying so safe and routine, the passengers are more concerned about retrieving their bags on arrival than they are about the ability of the aircraft to return them safely to the ground in zero visibility.”

And it all began in Worcestershire.

Think on that the next time you are touching down in Timbuktu.

􀁥 Top Secret Boeing is on sale in the National Trust shop at Croome, near Pershore, Sedgeberrow Books in Pershore, Blandford Books in Broadway, WH Smith in Worcester and Malvern