During the siege of the Sanctuary of the Virgen de la Cabeza the Captain of the Air Corps, Carlos de Haya, a true guardian angel of the besieged troops, carried out nearly 90 supply missions in aid of the defending soldiers, in different aeroplanes and often under the most adverse conditions. For his selfless dedication to the mission and the fearlessness shown during these flights, being hit by enemy fire on numerous occasions, he received the maximum military award, the Laurel Crowned Cross of San Fernando.

The precarious means available at the initial stages of the war made it necessary to think up ingenious ways of getting through supplies (so essential but not as abundant as would have been wished) with safety and precision, owing to the scarcity of aeroplanes that could not be deferred from other war missions, as well as the insufficient number of dropping mechanisms.
Captain Haya, in an effort to get the maximum efficiency out of the supplies being transported to the Sanctuary, devised a system that combined the maximum load of food and supplies with the minimum amounts of elements and medicines required to guarantee the safe dropping off of the aid packages. This idea consisted of storing the lightweight loads in baskets which, tied to the feet of live turkeys, softened the impact of the drop helped by the wing flutter of the birds, thus rendering edible the “braking system” employed.
Captain Haya had come from the service corps and therefore the 1st Graduation Class of the Air Service Corps, proud of the feats of their Corps predecessor and companion and wishing to honour his memory, adopted as their graduation year emblem the one shown below, on account of its peculiar origin and its notoriety.

Later, the events that took place that day would for some time after be related as follows by his adversaries: “ Scarcely 30 minutes had passed since the squadron had taken off when 2 cars arrived at the field carrying several men accompanied by a Captain of the M.A. who told us they were a supervisory committee. One and a quarter hours after the take off, the squadron spied a single plane flying at a relatively low altitude and which was heading in the direction of the field without a fixed vertical plane and without a rudder. One of the members of the committee shouted out “Tail-less plane! Tail-less plane!” The plane landed with difficulty and the pilot, Manuel Orozco Roviro, explained that a Fiat had crashed into him and he did not know what had happened to it. The following day we found out from a Lieutenant of the Squadron that according to the Nationalist radio station, in the combats between Chatos and Fiats fought in the early afternoon of the previous day, in which more than 50 planes had taken part with fatalities on both sides, as a result of a crash with a fighter pilot, Carlos de Haya Gonzalez had been killed.
One of the Chatos pilots was shocked when he heard of Captain Haya’s death as he had been a pupil of his in the School of Aviation Mechanics and Captain Haya had helped him a lot, giving him books and flying with him in the training sessions of non-visibility flight in the evenings in the countryside around Alcala de Henares.

"…Taking advantage of the May moon I wanted to make a test and resistance flight and filling the ‘Dornier 15’ with 3,600 litres of fuel, Carlos Haya, a highly skilled pilot and expert in night flying, the mechanic Madariaga, and I, at two o’clock in the afternoon and after a smooth take off, began our flight, which lasted until ten o’clock the following morning, at which time we made a sea landing with about twenty litres of petrol remaining in the tank.

Although the Observatory had not foreseen it, from twelve o’clock midnight until ten in the morning, it was pouring with rain and along the whole coastline between Barcelona and Cartagena, under very difficult flying conditions that put to the test our “Hispano” engines, in spite of the vast amount of water around us, there was not a single mechanical failure during the entire flight.

We did this several times along the coast between Los Alcazares and Barcelona and between Los Alcazares and Alicante, flying at an average speed of 150 km/h and, towards the end, we circled Mar Menor, as the poor visibility caused by the downpour made the flight dangerous. We finished the test flying up and down the Mar Menor coastline sixteen times.

After this twenty hour flight, in which I was so ably assisted by the extraordinary expertise of Carlos Haya, I refuelled the plane up to its 4,150 litre capacity, which extended the flight duration to twenty three or twenty four hours and the flying range increased to 3,500 kilometres…"