http://www.furthermore.org.uk/static.../penrose16.htm
The years rolled on. At 62 Penrose was offered an attractive retirement package, which he accepted. His ventures into boat-building proved fruitless, but he was more successful as an author, which was just as well, for inflation ate into his pension. In all he wrote eleven books, of which his British Aviation (five volumes) became a classic.
And so the wheel turned its circle. Eventually Penrose had to give up one of his boats and one of his two biplanes: they were too just expensive to keep. But it was not quite over yet: for the man who had seen the dawn of aviation, who had taken his baptism of the air dangling from a Cody kite, who had flown an Avro 504, who had test-piloted nearly 400 different civil and military aircraft as diverse as the high-altitude PV3 and the low-altitude Wyvern torpedo bomber, the high-speed Whirlwind and the low-speed Lysander, who had seen the flight of Bleriot aircraft and the Space Shuttle, fate had one more card to turn: now in his seventies, Penrose acquired a tailless microlight aircraft with a seat in the open, a tricycle undercarriage, a Henri-Farman-style horizontal elevator in front, a rear-mounted 17hp engine driving a pusher propeller, and a high-mounted swept wing with vertical fins at the wingtips. He named it the Pterodactyl Ascender, and flew it and his other biplane well into his eighties. He died on 31st August 1996, aged 92. Let the last words be his:
A gallon of petrol, and the skies are mine again.
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