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Adrian Boyd

British flying ace of WWII

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMay 3, 2026
Entity authorityQ123312286
Source-derived summary

Adrian Boyd, (1 January 1913 – 21 January 1975) was a British flying ace who served with the Royal Air Force (RAF) during the Second World War. He was credited with having shot down at least eighteen aircraft.

Born in Sialkot in British India, Boyd's initial military service was with the Royal Navy, from which he resigned in 1934. Two years later he joined the RAF, serving with No. 65 Squadron once he completed his flying training. Soon after the outbreak of the Second World War, Boyd was posted to No. 145 Squadron which operated Hawker Hurricane fighters. He flew during the Battle of France and achieved a number of aerial victories for which he was subsequently awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC). Further successes followed during the Battle of Britain, including five aerial victories in one day on 8 August 1940. The recipient of a Bar to the DFC, he was rested from duties in November and spent several months as an instructor before returning to operations with a posting as commander of No.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Adrian Boyd” is british flying ace of WWII. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Adrian, Boyd and British, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1913, 1975, 1934, 1940—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1913-01-01. For this dossier, Adrian, Boyd and British is the immediate research focus.
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The phrase “british flying ace of WWII” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q123312286. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1913, 1975, 1934 and 1940.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Adrian Boyd” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.