Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Kennedy: RAF airman who evacuated POWs in the Korean War, took part in the Berlin Airlift and flew over Suez and Rhodesia

The exigencies of military supply by air made Thomas Lawrie "Jock" Kennedy a master of the skies who flew across every continent, equipping him also to push forward the use of advanced strategic defence technology at the height of the Cold War. The Berlin airlift of 1948-49 taught him precision flying with full loads at specified altitudes, and landing procedure on pierced-steel makeshift runways.

At the end of the Korean War in 1953 he evacuated prisoners of war across storm-tossed mountains with the danger ever present of iced-up wings. In Operation Musketeer during the Suez crisis of 1956 he learned how to bomb in anger, and during upheaval in Africa in 1965 he practised organisation at speed.

The former Boy Scout from Hawick in the Scottish Borders who joined up in 1946 as a National Service airman, then trained as an officer at RAF Cranwell, was to win the Air Force Cross and Bar for his operational flying skills as well as rising to be an air chief marshal and Knight Grand Cross of the Bath.

His worldwide adventures gave him knowledge invaluable from 1957 to 1960 as senior pilot at the Royal Radar Establishment at Malvern, testing airborne radar systems on the Vickers Valiant, which was developed to carry Britain's nuclear deterrent, and on the high-altitude Canberra bomber. It was the radar post that brought the Bar to the Air Force Cross that he had been awarded in 1952, after flying a slow Hastings bomber in company with faster Canberras, on a goodwill tour of South America.

Kennedy advanced via the RAF Selection Board, HQ Middle East from 1962-64, and the Royal College of Defence Studies in 1976, to be Air Officer Commanding of the RAF's Northern Maritime Air Region from 1977-79. As such he controlled Nimrod surveillance patrols that ranged from the North Sea to within the Arctic Circle, working from Pitreavie Castle in Fife, the headquarters of the RAF's Northern Maritime Air Region, to track the movements of Soviet submarines.

The radar and AOC positions were the fruit of varied experience in the air that began as soon as Kennedy graduated from Cranwell in 1949. The first duties of the 20-year-old former pupil of Hawick High School, whose father was John Domone Kennedy, author of Forest Flora of Southern Nigeria (1936), were themselves to become literary material: he was plunged into the Allied airborne delivery of food, coal, and medicines to the Soviet-blockaded population of Berlin that was immortalised in 1951 by the thriller writer Hammond Innes in Air Bridge.

Innes' novel includes scenes in the place at Berlin's Gatow airport where Kennedy, a Hastings pilot, would have paused to restore energy between flights, with hot tea and a "wad". This was the RAF "Malcolm Club", one of many at RAF bases overseas, which were named after a squadron leader awarded the Victoria Cross after being shot down in 1942.

The "Mally" clubs, which Airlift crews relied on, closed in the 1960s, but left their mark so deeply on Kennedy's memory that he was to preserve their records for the RAF Museum, Hendon, to which he gave the papers in 2006. The Soviets lifted the blockade on 12 May 1949 and the airlift drew to a close four months later.

Kennedy served in No 24 Squadron before an exchange from 1953 to 1955 with the Royal Australian Air Force took him to Korea and Japan as part of RAAF 36 Transport Squadron flying C-47 Dakotas. The squadron was ready for "all conditions of flight, and Korea had them all," an Australian colleague said later. "Mountainous terrain, thunderstorms, snowstorms, typhoons, severe turbulence, zero vision, dangerous winds … in-flight icing … overloading…." In the two months following the end of the Korean war in July 1953 the squadron evacuated more than 900 Commonwealth prisoners of war from Korea to Japan.

A decade later, the turbulence that would require Kennedy's wings was in Africa. "We shall not stand idly by," the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson vowed in December 1965 after white-ruled Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) declared UDI – a unilateral breakaway from Britain and the Commonwealth that prompted Britain to impose sanctions and had the effect of cutting fuel supplies to Rhodesia's newly independent neighbour Zambia, once Northern Rhodesia.

Within 48 hours of the oil embargo, the House of Commons was told, "supplies of oil were flown into Zambia by RAF Britannias". Kennedy was the Commanding Officer of No 99 (Britannia) Squadron which did the job, and in a debate on 25 January 1966 the Minister of State for Commonwealth Relations, Cledwyn Hughes, added: "I should like to pay tribute to the officials, officers and men who went to work with such speed and effectiveness."

In the 1970s Kennedy, a man of charm whom all ranks held in much esteem and affection, was Commanding Officer, RAF Brize Norton, Deputy Commandant, RAF Staff College, and Director of Operations (Air Staff) at the Ministry of Defence. He became Deputy Commander-in-Chief, RAF Strike Command from 1979-81, Commander-in-Chief, RAF Germany and Commander 2nd Allied Tactical Air Force from 1981-83, and for the next three years, before his retirment in 1986, Air Member for Personnel and Air ADC to the Queen.

He joined the aircraft equipment-maker Dowty as a director, and as controller of the RAF Benevolent Fund from 1988-93 raised more than £20m, also serving as Chairman of the International Air Tattoo at Fairford, Gloucestershire. He was a Deputy Lieutenant of Leicestershire.

Thomas Lawrie Kennedy, aviator: born Hawick, Scotland 19 May 1928; AFC 1953 and Bar 1960, CB 1978, KCB 1980, GCB 1985; married 1959 Margaret Ann Parker (one son, two daughters); died Manton, Rutland 18 November 2013.