As commander-in-chief of the armed forces, King Charles was a member of the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy.
It has long been customary for the monarch and prominent members of the royal family to be connected to or involved in the armed services, dating back to the time when the king led his army into war.
Like his father, King Charles developed a strong interest in flying after joining the Royal Air Force. While attending Cambridge University, he received his first flight instruction. Years later, there were even rumours that he had flown the royal plane alone to meetings and assignments overseas.
The prince at the time was an expert pilot who loved to fly. But catastrophe nearly happened in 1994 when Charles was about to land a passenger jet on Queen’s Flight. The plane crashed because things didn’t go as planned; if things had gone differently, we may have had a monarch named William today.
For many years, King Charles has been getting ready for life as king. As the heir apparent, he had a wide range of governmental responsibilities.
Charles becomes the Head of the Commonwealth, hence his accession to the throne affects more than just the United Kingdom. Charles assumes the role of head of state for 15 countries, comprising Australia and Canada, out of the 54 sovereign states.
For many years, King Charles has carried out his regal obligations. He has travelled to numerous other nations and has mostly done so without any problems.
Charles, though, came dangerously close to being at the centre of two separate accidents that could have been extremely deadly.
He could have actually passed away, and it happened during a live television broadcast.
The Mary Rose, the flagship of King Henry VIII, lost in a battle with the French fleet in 1545. It would lie on the ocean floor for centuries after it sank in the Solent, between the Isle of Wight and Great Britain.
Prince Charles was present to witness the excavation of The Mary Rose in October of 1982. Charles backed the efforts to raise the ship from her oceanic grave since he was a tremendous lover of its past.
He thus desired to observe the procedure firsthand. He was even one of the last divers, diving with archaeologists by the wreck just outside Portsmouth Harbour.
At a 2014 volunteer and fundraising meeting at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard in Hampshire, Charles reminisced, “I remember my days of diving on the ship out in the Solent in the most impossible conditions. It was like swimming in a kind of lentil soup, you couldn’t see anything, or so I thought, until it was under your nose.”
“The sheer mastery of the underwater archaeologists was something I could never get over.”
In addition, the former Prince remembered urging employees to report for duty in spite of weather-related delays and technological issues.
“The tremendous crash when the chains came down is something I will never forget, and I felt completely responsible for it. We have this incredibly amazing specimen of a Tudor vessel, which is unique, therefore I think it was worth the risk,” Charles remarked.
He will never forget the crash, as King Charles once said. In actuality, though, the collision might go down in history as the day the heir apparent passed away. This is based on the Raising the Mary Rose: The Lost Tapes documentary on Channel 4, which was released 40 years after the excavation.
Charles examined the vessel closely as it was raised from the ocean floor, according to the Daily Mail. His plan was to board the ship’s remnants. But security was paramount, and the concept was dismissed as being too risky.
The enormous crane known as Tog Mor—Gaelic for “big lift”—collapsed out of nowhere. The point where the monarch would have stood was where the frame broke away and nearly crushed the ship’s hull.
Similar to his father, Prince Philip, Charles developed a strong passion for aviation. He made the decision to carry on his late father’s legacy.
Philip Pinney, the squadron commander at the time, gave Prince Charles his first flying instruction in 1968 while he was a student at Cambridge University. He studied all the fundamentals for two and a half years with him.
“We had a laid-back relationship in which he would call up on the weekends and ask to be taken out in the aircraft. One summer, when training was deployed to Aberystwyth, he would join us in the mess, fly as much as he could, and spend our free time hiking and fishing.” According to Squadron Leader Philip Pinney, it was an amazing experience.
Charles continued on to RAF College at Cranwell, where he was granted his wings in August of that same year.
The prince’s tutor at RAF College, Squadron Leader (and later AIR Chief Marshal) was Sir Richard Johns.
“I had to have total confidence in the pilots I was teaching. Prince Charles was naturally gifted and quick to learn things up. He was a pleasure to teach, and I was struck by how perfectly he was determined to succeed in addition to having perfect focus and concentration. It was that simple: he was not going to fail,” he declared.
King Charles had been ready for the next phase of his schooling thanks to Sir Richard Johns and Philip Pinney. He got aviation training and was ready for a future in the Royal Navy. Charles soon gained his helicopter pilot certificate and began flying from the Commando aircraft carrier HMS Hermes.
