Air commodore Ronald ‘Ronnie’ Brown was a consultant in burns and plastic surgery in the RAF. He was born in London on 11 September 1925. His father, Oscar Frank Brown, was director of telecommunications research during the Second World War and prominent in the development of radar. His mother, Doris Kathleen Brown née Emery, was a medical officer in charge of the venereal diseases department at the South London Hospital for Women and Children. He attended University College School, Hampstead and subsequently gained a first class honours degree in physiology at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he became president of the Oxford Union (the first medical student to do so). He was awarded a senior Hulme scholarship and went on to complete his clinical studies at the Middlesex Hospital, where he won prizes in forensic medicine and public health. Having served in the Middlesex Home Guard during the Second World War, he signed on for a short service commission in the medical branch of RAF in 1952, and a permanent commission in 1955, retiring as an air commodore in 1989. During his 34 years in the RAF he served at RAF Halton, and at East Grinstead, being the last RAF plastic surgeon to have trained under Sir Archibald McIndoe. After a short time at RAF Ely, he was posted to Singapore, returning to Halton prior to a two-year posting to Aden from 1964 to 1966. He returned to RAF Ely, remaining there until 1971, when, on the death of air vice-marshal George Morley, he was posted to assume command of the burns and plastic surgery unit at Princess Mary’s RAF Hospital, Halton, where a number of Falklands War burns casualties were treated. He was director of surgery for the RAF from 1986 to 1989. He became the Cade professor of plastic surgery in the RAF at the Royal College of Surgeons of England and also held honorary consultant posts at St Bartholomew’s Hospital and Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. He was president of the section of plastic surgery of the Royal Society of Medicine, of the British Burn Association and the Military Surgical Society. He served on the council of the British Association of Plastic Surgeons from 1982 to 1984. He was elected as a freeman of the Worshipful Company of Barbers, and in 1987 was made an honorary physician to the Queen. He won the Kay-Kilner prize in 1963 for his essay ‘The management of traumatic tissue loss in the lower limb, especially when complicated by skeletal injury’, later published in the *British Journal of Plastic Surgery* (*Br J Plast Surg*. 1965 Jan;18:26-50). He also published papers on the cleft-lip nose (‘A reappraisal of the cleft-lip nose with the report of a case’ *Br J Plast Surg*. 1964 Apr;17:168-74), missile injuries in Aden (‘Missile injuries in Aden, 1964-7’ *Injury*. 1970 Jan;1[4]:293-302] and the history of plastic surgery in the Armed Forces (‘The continuing story of plastic surgery in Britain’s Armed Services’ *Br J Plast Surg*. 1989 Nov;42[6]:700-9). In 1990 he gave the McIndoe lecture at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, entitled ‘Fifty years in retrospect’. After retirement he was president of the Medical Artists’ Association (from 1991 to 2006). He also sat on the main grants committee of the RAF Benevolent Fund as a medical adviser. Ronnie became active in the Travelling Surgical Club (TSS), where he was described as ‘being most welcoming in a quiet unassuming manner to all those attending’. After moving to West Sussex he became a guide at Chichester Cathedral and, in 2007, he and his wife Margaret (née Treacher), whom he married in 1949, gave the only ‘husband and wife’ lecture to the TSS entitled ‘Enthusiasms – guiding: hymns ancient and hers modern’. Ronnie died peacefully on 18 July 2021 aged 95. He was survived by Margaret and their two children, Alison, a physiotherapist, and Anthony, who became the first professor of emergency medicine in Brisbane, Australia.