Tinworm-wings: My first outlanding and the first aircraft into Pitsford this year!

Saturday 3 January 2009

My first outlanding and the first aircraft into Pitsford this year!

Engine failures in the Quantum went fine, so late morning I started kitting out for my first flight out of the circuit. I borrowed a radio and headphones from Stew, taped a jotting scrap to my map-board and bungeed a pen to it, to make RT calls easier (runways and QNH/QFE settings have to be relayed back to the tower, and RT itself can be a handful for the nervous novice, as it is), carried a stopwatch and put my phone in my mapboard. I borrowed Flylight's Vario (which shows two altimeters simultaneously) and all kitted out like someone off Top Gun, swaggered off to my fighter in slow motion.

I departed from 05 into a right hand circuit (all RT calls having gone smoothly) and departed the circuit from the base leg and headed for Pitsford reservoir, which I approached a little under 2000'. Previously with Neill, I had landed from the East, but with the wind direction in the opposite direction, I lost height over the water and seemed to just hang there in space, hovering almost! Eventually I had lost sufficient height to make an approach and dropped down smoothly onto the grass strip, with just a bit of a cross wind to contend with....and touched down.

I was elated.

This was my first ever solo out-landing. Granted, it is only 17 minutes from Sywell, but nonetheless, navigating and flying alone for the first time gives you hell of a buzz. I taxyed down to the windsock, parked up and went to sign in. The landowner waved from the house and approached with the landings log and introduced himself as Richard Stanley, a really nice chap whose family happily entertain microlights on their beautifully located and maintained grass strip, despite the fact that they are not pilots themselves. Generously, they charge no landing fees, but there is a voluntary collection tin for the Air Ambulance.

Richard said that I was the very first to land at Pitsford this year! We had a brief chat and then, after Richard had taken a shot for the blog, I texted Neill with news of my landing and then took off, pootled about a bit, then made my approach call back to Sywell and made my first solo over-head join.....and Cath's "nice landing" compliment didn't come with a qualifier :)

I flew again later in the afternoon after crewing for Stew, who took the Alatus out for a check flight and had trouble starting it. My last flight was brief as sunset was approaching. I found what Stew later called "controlled drift" quite tricky. I was being pushed sideways, which is an odd feeling, but eventually turned positively downwind and decided that would be my final circuit as it was getting hard to manage up there. I mentioned this to Neill, feeling a bit discouraged but he put it positively: "The thing is, you managed it".

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Ground handling (how to store an aeroplane at home and get it to the airfield)

A trial flight in a Thruster, when I was 28, c.1991

I have started to learn to fly before...TWICE! First time round I had just graduated and got a job at an aerodrome in Cornwall, where I earned flying hours by fuelling microlights, giving hourly weather reports to the Met office etc. The weather was bad, so there was little flying to be had...and in the end I was paid with broken propellers and bits of crashed fuselage to hang on the wall. The boss was a great bloke called Ian Stokes, who had been a leading light in forming the BMAA and had manufactured Thrusters in the early days . In retirement he moved to The Gambia and became a publican and, shockingly, was murdered this year.

Flying Rogues

ten years on from my first experiences at Moorland Flying School (and now nearly ten years ago) the flying school was under new management and my girlfriend and I booked full courses. We both made good progress initially but never felt we were being moved on and had difficulty pinning the instructor down to signing our logbooks. When another instructor signed himself as P1, we got suspicious, contacted the CAA and were horrified to learn that our instructor did not have a current instructor rating, that we had not been insured and that none of our hours counted towards our licences. We were eventually refunded and the instructors were prosecuted by the CAA.

The very sympathetic CAA investigator spoke to the BMAA on our behalf and my hours have been allowed to count (at the discretion of the school). But in point of fact, I flew way over the minimum number of hours subsequently, so it is really quite academic in the end.

Around 2001 an instructor in Norfolk tried to convince me that if I bought his aeroplane he could teach me at a cut rate, as I'd then be using my own plane. Great idea, I thought, except that it turned out that the aircraft in question had failed a noise test and could not be used from the instructor's field. He later admitted that I would have to learn on his aeroplane at the normal rate. He resisted showing me the paperwork, kept avoiding me and eventually, when it was quite clear I wasn't going to buy without the paperwork, told me to F-off.

So far my experience has been that there are a lot of rogues in flying, which is one reason why I was so very impressed by the professional set-up at Sywell.

by air to Africa

My sister and I were lucky to fly many thousands of miles in the 1960s and '70s in many aircraft types, including BOAC VC-10s, Boeing 707s and even a Nigerian Airways Dakota, as our dad (and later our mum) had teaching posts in Kenya and Nigeria. Those were still the romantic days of flying, when passengers walked across tarmac and up steps, rather than walking down the tubes that have turned passenger flying into a mundane affair. (Mind you, aren't take-offs still incredibly exciting!?)

Back then air hostesses GAVE children the sorts of nick-nacks that their parents have to pay fortunes for from the airline catalogue these days; things like model aeroplanes, keyrings etc. We were also given sweets to help us cope with depressurisation. (And they were hostesses, so nobody give me a hard time)

Mum says that I cracked my first joke when I was small, on a flight out to Kenya, when I said, "Mummy, shouldn't there be a wing on this side of the plane too". Apparently I got her with that one.

At Kano airport I remember standing behind an engine and thinking how hot it still was....and then being told that the engine was cold. The heat was Kano. I got a headache and took several days to aclimatise.

The airport perri-ways at Kano were littered with aircraft that didn't make it, including a burnt-out Mig 15. The Nigerian Airforce flew them and my dad played squash with one of their pilots, Ben, at the Kano Club. I recall a Mig fly-past on my birthday. Was it arranged with Ben over a beer? Was it a pure coincidence?

At Entebbe airport (Uganda) I remember climbing down the steps on to the runway and being encircled by soldiers with machine guns, who then went through all our belongings and confiscated my cherished Swiss Army penknife, purchased on one of numerous European stop-overs. That was in the twitchy time after the Israeli hijacking ...and mum had to stifle my protests.

Before my first flight to Nairobi, as an infant, I was scared stiff. I didn't understand that I wouldn't have to sit astride the fuselage, as I did on my pedalcar! In a funny way, I not only overcame that fear but have come full circle; microlighting is just like sitting on that pedalcar......open to the elements - real flying!