Leong Ming Sen was born in Ipoh on September 15, 1920, to an affluent family of seven children. He studied at St. Michael’s Institution.

The Leongs lived on Clayton Road and its proximity to the padang was a big plus. Their comfortable home was a halfway house to a number of St Michael boys who shared Ming Sen’s love of games. MS was always free to indulge his whims. He had all the time to spin tops and fly kites, play table tennis, hockey, football and badminton. He excelled in any field he entered.

BROTHER FINAN’S IRE

But his intense love of sports also landed him in trouble when we were 17 years old. In 1937, Brother Finan Ryan was Brother Director of St Michael’s. He expected the boys to follow his rules one hundred per cent. For example, nobody should play in the padang at particular hours – say, right after the lunch hour. Probably he didn’t want the boys to be sweaty when they returned to the classroom, something like that. To violate this rule was to invite expulsion from the august institution. MS and another friend, Teh Khoon Chuar – (another colourful character; he migrated to the US and passed away a few years ago) – just could not stay away from the padang and broke Brother Finan’s law. They were expelled. No compromises. His friends were all shocked and saddened. MS took it on the chin in his usual quiet, unflappable way. He moved on and finished at the Anglo-Chinese School.

Perhaps his friend was consoled by the fact that he played for Perak in both hockey and football.

UNIVERSITY DAYS & THE WAR

In those days, if you wanted to pursue a university degree, you had to get out of Malaya. His friend Capt Ho Weng Toh went to Hong Kong and in one of his visits to Ipoh prodded Ming Sen to join him. In Hong Kong, Capt Leong Ming Sen - fondly known as MS, immediately shone. Again, his natural talent for sports made him as popular as ever. He enrolled in economics.

After Hong Kong fell to the Japanese in 1941, the then 21-year-old MS and Capt Ho together with some of their peers, staged a daring escape to “Free China”. Our goal was to reach Chungking. MS reached Chengtu. There, at the West China Union University, he decided to resume his studies.

Around this time, he became troubled by the heightened need for medical personnel. He thought he should be a doctor and for more than two years studied to be one. Once more, fate would intervene. The more urgent demand for pilots during the last stages of the war decreed that MS should also be one. He answered a call for pilot trainees from the China National Aviation Corporation, then China’s only commercial airlines. He was to excel in this field. Capt Ho had by then finished his pilot training and become a bomber pilot.

MS attended what essentially was a “crash programme of the “you either make it or you don’t” type. He cut his teeth as a pilot by flying delivery mission over the “hump”, a treacherous route over the foothills of the Himalayas. The flying missions over the “hump”, averaging 120 hours a month, using the DC-3 would take off from Kunming, loaded with tin ingots for an airstrip in the Assam Valley (for trans-shipment to America). They would return to China loaded with aviation gasoline.

He was also a member of the Flying Tigers, a volunteer squadron of Chinese and American pilots involved in the anti-Japanese war effort. Sometimes they would carry food supplies which they dropped to Nationalist Forces fighting in the plains and valleys below.

His superiors were impressed with his natural aptitude for flying and MS undertook nine months of training in Calcutta before taking up a new post at the China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC) main base in Shanghai where he remained even after the Japanese surrender. In Shanghai, he married his first wife, Ann.

In 1947, barely four years after his first flight, MS was made captain. This was a rare feat.

CAREER MOVES

He declined to move to Formosa (now Taiwan) during the Nationalist retreat in 1949 and instead returned to Malaya with his wife. It was 1950. He did not see himself having much to contribute to the bourgeoning rubber and tin industries. He joined the fledgling Malayan Airways, a company controlled then by expatriates. MS was the first Asian to be signed up as co-pilot.

Limited promotional opportunities at Malayan Airways made him move to Singapore Standard newspaper company in 1952. That was also the year of his divorce. At the Standard, MS flew a DC-3 aircraft, making sure the papers landed in KL, Ipoh and Penang before the rival dailies hit the stands. From the Standard he transferred over to a Chinese daily, doing the same job for a brief spell before leaving to study for his Airline Transport Pilot’s Licence in Southampton. However, before he could finish the course there, he returned to Malaya to take up a lucrative offer with Federation Air Service (FAS) – the first local man to be named captain in the company that had a fleet of five Beaver aircraft.

For FAS, MS flew a route confined to the smaller towns in the peninsula. It was the height of the Malayan Emergency. MS stayed with the group until it was taken over by Malayan Airways in 1958 when he was transferred to Singapore. In 1962, he was appointed acting Captain of a DC-3. It was the command MS had long wanted.

TRAINING CAPTAIN

He went on to teach trainee pilots with Malaysian Airways in 1963. Malaysian Airways then morphed into Malaysia-Singapore Airlines and when this company split in 1972, he chose to join Singapore Airlines (SIA), where he became a training captain on Boeing 737 aircraft.

When he retired in 1975, he was deputy chief pilot. At the time of his retirement from Singapore Airlines in 1980, MS had 23, 600 flying hours to his credit. He was a leading light in the SIA pilot training programme. He was F27, DC-3 and B737 Training Captain.

MS was a natural pilot and a natural teacher. He always made things easy and somehow passed on this air of confidence to his trainees.

Capt Ho was always in awe of this gift. If there was a particularly difficult case and he was at the point of giving up, he would pass him on to MS. MS would take over without fuss and somehow matters improved. MS never pulled rank or showed off; he was never insulting. He always remembered the time when he himself was learning and till the end held that it was pointless to berate anyone for something the fellow did not know.

When MS died in June 2008, three months shy of his 88th birthday – he is survived by his second wife Diana, three grown children and three grandchildren – countless pilots gathered at his wake. There they exchanged anecdotes of MS’s legendary talents and generosity of spirit.

Capt Ho had a long list to contribute to this commentary. Both of them had been friends for 80 years after all. Through youth’s uncertainties, adult involvements, marriages, fatherhood and grandfatherhood, bereavement and health concerns, MS and I always managed to reach each other. Their friendship was one of a long, lively, protracted conversation.