Princess Anne may be used to glamourous and extravagant meals as a royal but there’s one food she’s very keen on during flights and it’s a very common and much loved one.
King Charles’s former pilot, Graham Laurie, has revealed that the Princess Royal would enjoy Fray Bentos pies whilst on the plane during the Royal Family’s summer holidays.
He told Hello!’s A Right Royal Podcast: “We never left without what I call the bottom line of catering.
“Those wonderful flat tinned meat pies by Fray Bentos and we would take that, we would take tinned vegetables, tinned potatoes and the stewards would start up a gravy, add a few spices to it.
“And we’d serve steak and kidney pie or chicken and leek pie.”
The King’s former pilot admitted the royals, including Princess Anne, used to love them.
He said: “They used to love it. I think it was such a pleasant change from all the poncey first class food. She enjoyed it.
“It was unusual to serve it in an aircraft but never the less they used to enjoy it.”
Laurie also recalled the day Princess Anne flew alongside 12 wet Labradors.
He said: “Probably the worst was one day up to Aberdeen, the Princess Royal got on board with 12 wet Labradors.
“Now, a) the smell b) the hair. And we had another royal [flight] to do that day.”
The former royal pilot talked about the reason Charles stopped piloting planes and explained it was due to the workload the then Prince of Wales had.
He said: “A lot of people thought that was because of the incident at Islay when we went off the runway, that I got the ticking off for.
“But it wasn’t, I’d already knew that he was going to stop. It was because of the workload he had, not just going on various engagements.
“But of course, he had to see all the papers that Her Majesty saw. So, he found that he couldn’t spend as much time up front, he had to dash down the back to do some work, and so forth.
“And on a few trips, he didn’t do the take-off. He just came up and did the landing. And it was getting more and more difficult to get him to do training.”
