Arthur Coningham

Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham, (19 January 1895 – presumably 30 January 1948), nicknamed "Maori", was a senior officer in the Royal Air Force. During the First World War, he was at Gallipoli with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, was discharged in New Zealand as medically unfit for active service, and journeyed to Britain at his own expense to join the Royal Flying Corps, where he became a flying ace. Coningham was later a senior Royal Air Force commander during the Second World War, as Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief 2nd Tactical Air Force and subsequently the Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief Flying Training Command. Coningham is chiefly remembered as the person most responsible for the development of forward air control parties directing close air support, which he developed as commander of the Western Desert Air Force between 1941 and 1943, and as commander of the tactical air forces in the Normandy campaign in 1944. However, he is frequently lauded as the "architect of modern air power doctrine regarding tactical air operations," based on three principles: necessity of air superiority as first priority, centralised command of air operations co-equal with ground leadership, and innovative tactics in support of ground operations. On 30 January 1948, he disappeared along with all the other passengers and crew of the airliner G-AHNP Star Tiger when it vanished without a trace somewhere off the eastern coast of the United States. Early life Coningham was born in Brisbane, Queensland, on 19 January 1895. His early life was one that made him learn to be adaptable. His father, also Arthur Coningham, was noted for playing Test cricket, but was by disposition a con man who was exposed in court for fabricating legal evidence in a trial designed to extort a Catholic priest, Denis Francis O'Haran, secretary to the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney. The resulting scandal drove the older Arthur Coningham to remove the Coningham family to New Zealand while Coningham was still young. The change of scene to New Zealand did not change the father's modus operandi; he spent six months imprisoned there for fraud.