Ann Welch

Ann Welch, who has died aged 85, was the world's best-known glider pilot. A wartime contemporary of Amy Johnson, she was a lifelong pioneer and contributor to four aviation sports - gliding, hang gliding, paragliding and microlight flying.

As a child in Cornwall, Ann, the daughter of Lt Col H Edmonds, a railway engineer, kept a diary of every aeroplane that flew over the family house. She took her first, brief flight at the age of 13, in a Fairey biplane at Wadebridge, after which, as she recalled in her autobiography, Happy To Fly (1993): "I knew that all I ever wanted was to fly, to just float around the cool sky, looking at the land and sea below, toylike and beautiful."

As soon as she was old enough to acquire a motorbike - no licence was then needed - she made frequent visits to Barnstaple aerodrome and, encouraged by a family friend, the writer Henry Williamson, took flying lessons there. At 17, she qualified for her Royal Aero Club pilot's licence.

Three years later, Ann began her gliding career at the London Gliding Club, at Dunstable, where the Anglo-German Fellowship held a gliding camp. A good-looking blonde, she was the only girl among 16 German and nine British students. With a propagandist eye on the future, the Nazi authorities sent over two of their top pilots, one of whom, Hanna Reitsch, soon became Germany's most famous woman flyer - and probably the only pilot to test and survive a modified V1 flying bomb.

After the camp, the young Britons were invited to Germany for a skiing and flying holiday - and attempts at indoctrination. Their lecturers included the then Nazi deputy leader Rudolph Hess, but Ann was unimpressed. "Her attitude was that it was terribly funny," recalled one of her daughters, "but could we get on with the flying, please?"

In 1938, Ann formed the Surrey Gliding Club with the help of Graham Douglas, whose family owned Redhill aerodrome and lent money to buy equipment. The project was an instant success, and, in 1939, Douglas and Ann were married. Inevitably, with the outbreak of the second world war she joined the Air Transport Auxiliary, and, like Amy Johnson, became a ferry pilot.

This provided them with unique opportunities to develop their flying skills, making routine deliveries of Tiger Moth biplanes, Hurricane and Spitfire fighters, and Blenheim twin-engined bombers from the factories to the airfields, where the RAF was desperately awaiting them. Sometimes, Ann recalled, she had only half an hour to familiarise herself with the controls of a new plane. In 1942, she flew a Spitfire just before the birth of her first daughter and, by the end of the war, her log book listed 150 aircraft types.

By the time Ann's marriage to Douglas, by then a wing commander and DFC, was dissolved in 1948, she had returned to gliding, and was training pilots and instructors. She restarted the Surrey Gliding Club at Kenley with two former RAF pilots who had been prisoners-of-war at Colditz castle. One of them, Lorne Welch, whom Ann married in 1953, had played a major part in designing the famous two-seater glider secretly constructed in an attic of the castle. But for the approaching end of the war, it would have been launched as an escape vehicle.

From then on, Ann and Lorne Welch were dominant figures in international gliding. As they wrote in one of their many books: "The small badges worn by soaring pilots are similar all over the world, and the wearer can be sure of a welcome wherever he goes... They do it because they like it, there being little or no commercial incentive, and they share a desire to find out more about the air in which they fly, with its varieties of solitude and violence, beauty and challenge."

With technical backup from Lorne, Ann led British international championship gliding teams for many years, winning in Spain in 1952, and in France in 1956. During the world contest at Lezno, in Poland in 1961, she beat the British women's distance record with 528 kilometres, landing just inside the Polish-Soviet frontier.

Her knack for team managing and solving problems led to her being co-opted onto many committees of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale and, for many years, she was the British delegate to the FAI gliding commission. In the late 1970s, she threw her experience and enthusiasm into new forms of sporting aviation, becoming president of the British Hang Gliding Association and, in 1991, president of the British Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association.

Showered with medals and awards, including the OBE, she was twice awarded the British Women Pilots' Association premier award for lifetime service; she died just three days before the second presentation ceremony was scheduled in London. Her husband died five years ago; three daughters survive her.

· Ann Welch, aviator and glider pilot, born May 20 1917; died December 5 2002.

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