Ron Davies died near London on 30 July 2011, three weeks past his 90th birthday.
Shortly before he died he saw an early copy of his final ‘magnum opus’ Airlines of the Jet Age: A History (Smithsonian Academic Press), on which he laboured for a decade.
Two-thirds of his life was devoted to the study of civil aviation through which his interest and knowledge of world geography expanded.
Curator of the Department of Air Transport in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. from 1981 to 2011, he wrote 25 books on airline history, wrote numerous articles for magazines, had a life-long interest in travel and an incredibly wide-ranging knowledge of all things geographical.