A previous version of this article reported that Sergeant Major Michael Booley stated that the version of events published in Prince Harry's 'Spare' was a 'complete fantasy'. In fact, Booley has never made any reference to this version of events as being 'fantasy', but believed the reference to flying sorties was 'dramatised' and disputed the accuracy of some other accounts in the book. We are happy to clarify this and apologise for the error.
Prince Harry's former Army instructor says his account of a "suicide" training flight has been 'dramatised' by a ghost writer, The Sunday Mirror reports. The Duke of Sussex claimed in his memoir Spare that an instructor had deliberately stalled their Slingsby T67 Firefly propeller plane without warning.
However, ex-Sergeant Major Michael Booley has insisted that every detail of training flights is discussed beforehand. He said: “I am staggered by this. In shock even.”
The prince wrote: “On one of our first flights together, with no warning, Booley threw the aircraft into a stall. I felt the left wing dip, a sickening feeling of disorder, of entropy, and then, after several seconds that felt like decades, he recovered the aircraft and levelled the wings.
