The heartbreaking story of the flying mathematicians of World War I

Keith Lucas and his colleagues endured freezing cockpits in aerial versions of Russian roulette

Keith Lucas was killed instantly when his BE2 biplane collided with that of a colleague over Salisbury Plain on October 5, 1916. As a captain in the Royal Flying Corps, Lucas would have known that his death was a very real risk of the work he was doing in support of Britain’s war effort.

But Lucas wasn’t a career pilot, he was a physiologist, and a rather good one at that, having been elected a fellow of the prestigious scientific organisation the Royal Society in 1913. So what had enticed him from the relative safety