AN ISLAND man who dedicated his life and career to the development of the hovercraft, Peter Habens, died peacefully at Vecta House residential care home, Newport, on February 5, aged 91.
Born in Gosport on July 3, 1925, he left school, aged 14, to join the Fleet Air Arm as a naval air apprentice.
Following wartime postings to Rosyth dockyard, Scotland, and Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, Mr Habens was posted to Cochin, India, in 1945, where he qualified as a petty officer.
Further postings included HMS Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, the aircraft carrier HMS Indefatigable and the Aeroplane and Armaments Experimental Establishment on Boscombe Down, Wiltshire, where he qualified as a chief petty officer.
He married June, his wife of 64 years, in Lyminster, West Sussex, in 1952. They had three sons.
Mr Habens left the navy in 1955 and joined Hawker Aircraft Ltd at Dunsfold, Surrey, where he worked for two years as a flight test technician.
He moved to the Island to work for Saunders-Roe in its flight test department on the SR53 interceptor fighter project for the RAF, which was cancelled in 1960 due to rapid advances made in surface-to-air missile technology.
In 1965, he joined the British Hovercraft Corpor-ation’s (BHC) service department at Osborne, where he became chief instructor.
Mr Habens went on to become customer training manager — providing technical training to more than 1,500 of BHC’s customers’ engineers and flight crew, which worked on the SRN5, SRN6, SRN4 and BH7 hovercraft.
A fellow of the Hovercraft Society, he retired after 30 years’ service. Mr Habens proposed and helped to run the Hovercraft Museum at HMS Daedalus, at Lee-on-the-Solent, for 18 years, until poor health intervened. The Hovercraft Museum continues to operate at the same venue today.
In the remaining nine years of his life, Mr Habens was resident at Vecta House suffering with Alzheimer’s disease.
His funeral was held at the IW Crematorium, Whipping-ham, on February 23.
Mr Habens leaves his wife, sons Ralph, Malcolm and Robert, seven grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.