Tinworm-wings

Wednesday 23 February 2011

A friend of mine recently called this thing I am going through, this ambivalence about not flying and about selling the Dragonfly, as my online nervous breakdown :)

He knows and I know that I really do not want to sell at all.

What I want is to resolve all the issues I can, which reduce the likelihood of flying: - Distance from airfield, rigging and derigging time, weather.

Can't do anything about the weather (other than live abroad - currently not an option), but the other two have to be within my capacity to address. So I have been looking to cut my journey time so that, if the weather changes, I can jump in the car and be at the airfield soon afterwards. That is NOT easy in Suffolk which is notoriouslly intolerant of aviation (planning restrictions etc).

I'd like to be able to roll up and just pull the plane out of the hangar fully rigged. When gaps in the weather are fleeting, you really don't want to be arsing about on the ground for too long.

On the BMAA forum people have been very helpful with suggestions of ostensibly GA airfields which tolerate microlights, and I have visited a couple. Elmsett has one runway but then because the aircraft there are heavier, cross-wind take-offs are presumably less of an issue. Grond handling there is the problem as usually there is nobody about and I am told people have gone home disappointed because they couldn't move whatever was blocking the doorway. The day I was there it was a heavy twin-engined beast which needs a tug to move it.

Yesterday I visited Tim Spurge's beautiful set-up at Great Oakley, near Harwich. Forty minutes from my front door, it feels massively closer than Sutton Meadows, so each trip would save me a tenner in petrol, which might -with a few trips each month- justify the considerably more expensive hangarage. I must say that I am very tempted. Security is very good, they have concrete floors, powered, lifting bi-fold doors , all aircraft are fully rigged and they have two wide, prevailing wind strips: 04,22, 27, 09....and quite honestly I could land diagonally across the intersection in any direction.

I am feeling up-beat. Looks like I might be on the way to finding a local field...and possibly even a way of keeping the Dragonfly, though that will mean that if I do three-axis, I will have to find some other way to afford a fixed wing. In the meantime, the conversion is going to take a while anyway, so I might as well make the most of the next 6 months or so of Dragonflying.

:)

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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!