Wife of pilot whose progeny became Olympic sailors

Alys Patricia MacAleavey, of Cabinteeley, who has died aged 93, had a remarkable life involving stays in various parts of the world.

She was born into the ruling colonial elite in India, the daughter of a first World War soldier and pilot. She married Kevin MacAleavey, an RAF squadron leader and navigator, after the second World War and spent 25 years with him in Montreal and Mexico at the headquarters of the International Civil Aviation Organisation. When Kevin died aged just 49, she returned to Ireland to raise her four children.

Patricia was born in 1920 in Karachi, then India, to Tom Humble and Alice Collier. Tom had survived being shot down over Flanders in 1917 and being a POW, before being posted to India in 1919.

Patricia's early years were spent in regal splendour, mainly in Peshawar in the North West Frontier Province but the good life came to a sudden end when her mother – and the baby – died in childbirth in Lahore when Pat was just five. She returned to England and was educated by Catholic nuns as a boarder at Farnborough Hill.

Love takes flight
She met Armagh man Kevin MacAleavey at a dance in Grimsby in 1944 – but just three months later his Lancaster bomber was shot down during a raid on V1 launch sites in northern France. She worried but stuck to her post until a letter arrived from Kevin in the Luftwaffe Stalag Luft 1 prisoner of war camp on the Baltic coast.

Patricia and Kevin married in 1946 and the following year Kevin became chief navigator in Aer Lingus/Aerlínte Éireann Following a change of government, plans for a new transatlantic service were scrapped and Kevin was out of a job.

But air transport was taking off everywhere else and ICAO was set up to regulate it. Kevin got a post at their headquarters and the family moved to Montreal. They moved with ICAO to its new American HQ in Mexico in 1957. They travelled widely and held legendary parties while rearing their four children, the last of whom, Cathy, was born in Mexico.

There were challenges of course, but she greeted these with the traditional stiff upper lip. Occasionally, she would suddenly lob an egg at one of the children shouting “Catch” – the lesson being to react quickly to whatever life throws at you.

Their world changed totally when Kevin suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 49. As her son Tommy was in Blackrock College, she moved to Ireland and bought the house Woodmancote on Killiney Hill Road. Subsequently she moved to Cabinteely Close.

She never rested and loved learning new skills. She enjoyed cars, was a fine tennis and table tennis player and to the end she was unbeatable at scrabble. She passed on her love of poetry to her children, with Rupert Brooke’s works being her favourites. “Do not despair for Johnnie head-in-air” had a special place in her heart.

In recent years she got great enjoyment out of the sailing achievements of her grandchildren and, at 92, came to the National Yacht Club after Annalise Murphy’s London Olympic campaign.