It was an act of extraordinary skill and bravery that made him an aviation legend - and a lifelong hero to a terrified six-year-old girl whose life he saved through his courage and cool-headedness in three minutes of mid-air drama in the summer of 1954.
Captain Phil Blown was piloting a Cathay Pacific passenger plane with 19 people on board from Bangkok to Hong Kong when it came under fire from Chinese fighter jets that ripped his plane apart. As bullets and cannon fire peppered the plane, Blown managed to keep the C-54 Skymaster, a variant of the Douglas DC-4, from breaking apart long enough to make a crash landing in the sea, then helped the eight other survivors aboard a dinghy as they waited to be rescued.
Amid the carnage he comforted the youngest survivor, Valerie Parrish. Her father and two brothers died, but she and her mother lived thanks to Blown and his co-pilot, Cedric Charlton, in what still ranks as the most extraordinary incident in Hong Kong aviation history.
The events of that July morning may be fading in the mists of time, but when Blown died in a nursing home in New South Wales, Australia, last month, aged 96, it was clear that his courage remains as vivid for Parrish today as it was more than half a century ago. Now in her 60s and living in her native United States, Parrish said her farewell to Blown in a moving poem, part of which reads:
'Lord, if roses grow in heaven
Please pick a bunch for me