Propellerhead

Mr Watson had arrived in our room at eight, as we slept off mild hangovers from staying up talking to Dan, his sister Seph, who had arrived that day and a couple of friends of his who had come for dinner. ‘Hullo, hullo. Are you up? D’you mind? There’s a fallen tree we need to shift. Shouldn’t take long but needs a couple of pairs of hands. Wonder if you’d like to help? And if you see Dan, tell him. Can’t think where he’s got to—he knew I wanted help. Shall we meet downstairs in fifteen minutes?’ And so, after a hasty piece of toast, we found ourselves, on a cool May morning, in charge of a chain-saw, bill hook, and tractor and trailer. At 10.30 am Lester had left to play the organ in the local church.

We left promptly after lunch. Over the not-quite-defrosted summer pudding, Mr Watson had mentioned some mattresses and a piano that needed shifting. There had been no further talk about arrangements for sharing the Thruster when it arrived: how we would avoid clashing, who would fly it when, how we would pay for it if it got damaged. Mr Watson had issued an open invitation and given us the run of a top-floor flat, if we wanted a summer holiday. Somehow any more formal discussion seemed inappropriate. ‘Nevertheless, I shall draw up an agreement,’ said Richard.

I was still reeling from the decisive turn my life had taken. We had ordered an aeroplane. There was no backing out: it was done. We seemed to have acquired some new friends, albeit of an eccentric and extraordinary kind. It was plain that Mrs Watson ran things, and Dan was friendly and easy-going. But, most of all, it was Mr Watson who had left an impression. He was unlike anyone we had met before. He made doing what you liked look so easy and obvious. He loved Africa, so he had started a business there. He wanted to fly, so he bought a plane. He liked the look of a mansion which everyone else saw as a liability. So he ignored them, and bought it. He answered to nobody except himself, and seemed to have complete control over his life. It was independence of mind of a fierceness that neither of us had encountered before.

That evening Richard, as syndicate administrator, drew up a ‘Contract of Agreement for the Salsingham Syndicate’. It ran to seven pages, and outlined terms of reference, terms of ownership, booking procedures, damage liability, shared expenses, individual expenses, conditions of leaving, priority of use on weekends and holidays, and other areas. ‘Isn’t it a bit formal? Doesn’t it imply we don’t trust each other?’

‘It’s not a matter of trust,’ said Richard. ‘It’s a matter of procedure.’ As Prime Suspect began on the television, I opened a cold Beck’s and settled down with The Microlight Pilot’s Handbook: ‘The advent of the microlight aeroplane has brought flying within the reach of many…’

Full Flying Member

Most of the time, the aeroplane flies not because of the pilot’s activity on the controls, but despite it.

Wolfgang Langewiesche, Stick and Rudder, 1944.

We had booked two weeks holiday in July for some intensive instruction and were installed in the top floor flat at Salsingham. Now that the idea had sunk in (the commitment of a bank loan had the effect of focussing my mind further), and weekends and holidays were now sorted for the foreseeable future, I was keen to get on and learn to fly as fast as possible. I had tried to book our holiday from the day the Thruster was delivered, but Sean said he needed a few days to assemble the plane, test fly it and generally tighten up any cords and cables which, because it was new, he said, tended to stretch or slacken in the first few hours of use.

It was now quarter to ten on Saturday morning. (I had been ready to start at eight or even seven—I wanted to be sure of getting my licence by the end of the fortnight—but Sean had told me to be patient. ‘Calm down. You’ll get plenty of flying.’) There was just the hint of a breeze, enough to feel the hairs on the back of my hands and arms as we followed Sean over to the huge black hangar.

The hangar was still shut and no one else was about. Sean picked up a metal crank leaning against the side and slotted it into a socket in the vast door. Each of the eight sliding doors, he said, was filled with sand—a wartime precaution to shield the hangar’s fragile contents from bomb blast—and weighed twenty tons. He braced his weight against the crank and heaved, grunting and flushing with the strain until the door gathered momentum, the crank began to twist with a vigorous torque of its own, and the noise of metal wheels grating on gritty runners became drowned by an echoing bass rumble.

The widening strip of sunlight cut a sharp rectangle through the gloom of the interior. Through particles of dust turning in the rays was a jumble of fins and elevators, wings and wires, rotors and aerials. The space was dominated by a giant military jet that looked like a Vulcan nuclear bomber, but which Sean said was a Canberra, a 1950s reconnaissance plane, now used, he said, by RAF technical staff to practise X-ray detecting for metal fatigue. Ranged beneath its wings was a tightly-packed assortment of helicopters, bi-planes, Cessnas, flexwing microlights (most of Sean’s teaching was on flexwings) and, amongst all these fins and wings and rotor blades, apologetic and minute in one corner, was the Thruster.

Sean dodged nimbly in amongst the machines—it struck me how awkward and fragile aircraft were in an enclosed space, with all their gawky projections and wires and sharp edges and delicate surfaces—and began to loosen the mesh. He pushed a plane back a few inches, pulled another up (by its prop) to fill the gap, nudged a tail-plane round, turned a propeller a few degrees to clear a wing. In this way he cleared enough of a passageway that, by raising and lowering the tail to clear a tail-fin or a bracing wire, he could just extricate the Thruster without any part of it quite touching another machine. Finally it was clear enough for him to put the tail down and trundle it onto the sunshine of the concrete fairing in front of the hangar. For the first time we had the chance to examine our new purchase properly.

The overall effect was of a large toy aeroplane with a cheeky expression. The rounded nose of the fibreglass pod in which the pilot and passenger were enclosed, and which protected them from the weather and the airstream, gave it the smug, perky expression of a Pekinese—cute or irritating, according to taste. The wings were blue and red, the fibreglass pod was white and the tail blue. It struck me that we could have given more thought to the colour scheme. Large white capitals spelt out her registration letters—Golf Mike Victor Oscar Yankee, or G-MVOY—on the underside of the wings and on the tail. The spotless new tyres and glinting windshield added to an overall effect of pristine prissiness which had been absent from the streaked wings, faded fabric and worn-in, workaday appearance of the machine at Popham. As the progeny of more than three quarters of a century of aeronautical research and development, it was hard not to think that something was missing. The engine had a pull-start like a lawn mower. The seats were the moulded plastic, school stacking variety (minus the metal legs). The tail-wheel was off a supermarket trolley. One of the flight controls looked uncannily like—and, on closer inspection, was—a nylon cord with a bathroom light switch on the end. The impression was simply of a machine unfinished. Her wings, however, were at least a version of traditional doped canvas (if a modern, Dacron-Terylene one) and she had a wooden propeller. ‘Right,’ said Sean. ‘Let’s get Thrashing.’

I went up first, leaving Richard reading the paper in the car. Once Sean had me strapped in to the left-hand seat, he told me to hold the throttle lever (car hand-brake position, down on my left) with my left hand, take the stick in my right hand, and steer with my feet on the rudder pedals. Gingerly I opened the throttle from its tick-over rate of 3,000 rpm. We didn’t move at all until the revs had reached at least 5,000 rpm, when we sprang forward across the fairing. ‘Steady,’ said Sean, promptly reducing the power with the dual lever his side.

It all felt most bizarre. Although pressing the left pedal turned the plane left, and vice versa, there was a slight delay in the reaction (and it worked much less effectively at low speed). This made it tempting to over-react, and our path towards the airfield commenced in an undignified zig-zag. When we got to the end of the runway, Sean stopped us on a slight upslope into wind and showed me the checks I had to do. These were mercifully few, boiling down to giving the stick a good stir to see that the controls were ‘full and free’, checking our seat-belts and helmet chin-straps were done up, that the few instruments were reading within their limits, and that there was sufficient fuel in the tank. Then he instructed me to taxi round in a circle (to check for any ‘traffic’ in the circuit) and line up. ‘Off you go then. What are you waiting for?’ he said, when I had done so.

I briskly opened the throttle and immediately incurred criticism.

‘Gently—everything you do in flying should be gentle. But positive. And open it fully: that’s only three quarters.’ We began to move forward along the grass, picking up speed. ‘Right, stick forward to raise the tail.’ As the tail came up, the ride stopped feeling rough and bumpy, and she moved much more easily. ‘See? Feel how much better she runs. Right, keep her straight with the rudder pedals. Now. Once you can feel that the tail’s up, just gently let the stick back to where it naturally goes, in the centre. Gently. That’s right. That’s all you have to do. Let the speed pick up now, and…there you are.’ Suddenly the ride felt smoother still, and I realised that the grass underneath the wheels was sinking away from us. ‘See? Simple as that.’ And it really was. The plane took off by itself.

I knew what to do now, from my Cessna lessons, and began to pull the stick back to make us climb. Sean briskly shoved it forward again. ‘Don’t pull the stick back yet: you’re not flying well enough: you’ll stall and crash. Just let the speed build up ’til she’s flying nicely. OK, now…just ease the stick back.’ A big flock of starlings fluttered into the air and wheeled away from us ahead and to the left.

In front of us, as we climbed, I could see a town. ‘Dereham,’ said Sean, pointing out the characteristic water tower, a big, ugly, conical edifice, as if a giant, round, plastic funnel had been jabbed into the ground as a mould and filled with concrete. (I did not realise then how much I would grow to love that water tower.) I could see cars moving along the A47 to Norwich. South of the airfield (though at the time I had no idea of my bearings) was the village of Barsham Green, with its church tower. There was another church, of worn and weathered brick and flint and a round tower on the north side of the airfield, and, to the east, a winding river meandered through lakes and gravel pits. A distinctive enough setting, perhaps, for an airfield, but the moment I looked away it disappeared and I was lost over an infinite patchwork mat of countryside.

That is pretty much all I took out of that first lesson. No doubt we practised a few turns and manoeuvres, but in no time we seemed to be back over the airfield and Sean was telling me to reduce the throttle to 5,000 rpm for my descent. ‘Gently. Christ,’ he said, as I inadvertently overdid it and we started to plummet. The approach to land was by far the hardest part. To judge, in three dimensions, an even descent from where I was in the air, to a specified point on the ground—let alone carry it out by co-ordinated manipulation of stick and throttle—was a task beyond impossible. ‘Right. I have control,’ said Sean, as I nearly hit a hedge a field short of the Barsham runway. He gave a burst of throttle which carried us neatly to the airfield.

After the confinement and intensity of the cockpit, it was good to stretch, peel off my flying suit and feel the warm air playing around my arms and ankles. The temperature had been about right at 1,000 feet with my ozee suit on. Back on the ground it was uncomfortably warm. As I slumped onto the grass, Coke in hand, and Richard strapped himself in, Sean shouted. ‘Get on with your ground school, Ants,’ (he had taken to calling me ‘Ants’). ‘Don’t just laze in the sun.’ Circumstances, however, were not conducive. The sun blazed from a spotless blue sky, with the breath of a breeze, just enough occasionally to twitch the big windsock on the west of the airfield.

For lunch Sean took us to the Barsham canteen. ‘We could go into Drear-am,’ he said doubtfully (Sean called East Dereham ‘Drear-am’). ‘But it’s hardly worth it.’ He referred, I knew, to Barsham’s labyrinthine one-way system with its platoons of sleeping policemen and 6 mph speed limit, enforced by the military police with the true viciousness of total boredom. The canteen would today win awards for its authentic war-time-rationing experience. From its bare, wiped-down counters all that was available were triangular meat paste sandwiches on curling Homepride (and maybe an apple or two) and Nice, Rich Tea or Digestive biscuits. The one concession to indulgence were some ‘Club’ biscuits, which turned out to be cracked and pale with age beneath the silver paper. A woman in a nylon apron served cups of stewed tea from a battered aluminium teapot.

After lunch, Sean showed us how to mix fuel for the Thruster. He added 200 mls of blue Duckhams motorbike oil to a 20-litre jerry can of petrol to make up the two-stroke mixture, then he swung the heavy can vigorously this way and that, twisting it as he did so to mix it. ‘Always make sure you’re putting in two-stroke mixture, not just petrol,’ he said, inserting a funnel with a stocking over the top into the Thruster’s tank. ‘You can tell by the colour. Petrol is straw-coloured. Two-stroke mixture, if you use Duckhams, has a blue tinge.’ He held the jerry can with the spout uppermost until it was half-empty, then turned it so that it emptied without surging and gulping. ‘Never fill up in the hangar, and never over grass. You’ll spill it and we get bare patches.’

My afternoon lesson felt a little better. The controls were not quite so strange, though I would not always have guessed it from Sean’s noisy imprecations. The taxiing and taking off now seemed straightforward, though Sean grabbed the throttle lever a couple of times while I was taxiing out and consistently told me to slow down. I had observed that while he made me bump and trundle along at a snail’s pace, when he taxied he opened the throttle, raised the tail and scorched along at about 30 mph.

Once off the ground, however, he couldn’t stop fussing about the air speed.

‘Always keep an eye on the air speed indicator. Your cruising speed should be 50-55 knots. Never let the air speed drop below 40 knots. What will happen if you do?’

‘We’ll stall.’2

‘Exactly. We’ll stall. And what happens if we stall?’

‘We crash.’

‘Exactly. The plane stops flying and falls out of the sky unless you take steps to recover. So make sure you don’t. Keep the air speed at, say a nice, steady 45 knots when you’re climbing, and somewhere over 50 in the cruise.’ I was sure that what he said made good sense, but the air was so pleasant, and my mood felt so good that I wished he could have relaxed a bit. I had complete confidence that, even if I did inadvertently stall the aircraft, Sean would soon have the situation under control. It was a lovely summer afternoon. Beneath us a tractor was cutting hay, and the scent drifted up. Most of the fields were deep with standing corn which was just turning from green to gold. The view was fantastic—I could almost see the coast—and up here the air was cool and refreshing: there was no doubt that it was the place to be.

‘Look at your air speed. Come on, wake up. Now, make a 180° turn to the left, and I don’t want to see the bubble move.’

I forced my mind back to the task in hand. Another of Sean’s preoccupations was turning out to be the slip indicator: the ball in the horizontal glass tube in the centre of the dashboard. This was supposed to remain central in its window at all times, indicating that the controls—the stick and the rudders—were being used correctly together, or ‘balanced’, in turns. Attempt a turn with too little rudder, or too much, and the bubble shot off to the right or left. In severely unbalanced cases the bubble disappeared altogether. Since Sean had told me about it, and I had started watching the instrument during turns, I had yet to set eyes on the ball at all.

Sean told me to fill up the Thruster before we packed up after Richard’s lesson. ‘Fill her up when you put her away and you won’t get condensation forming in the tank and water in the fuel next time you fly. Then we’ll do your log book, Ants.’ Later, in his office, he opened my log book and filled out the first two lines in his firm, careful handwriting. ‘Always fill in your log book straight after flying, then you don’t forget.’ Each of my two lessons was entered separately. There seemed to be a lot of boxes, to do with multi-engines, night and instrument flying, left blank. Under REMARKS, he wrote ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9a, 9b, 10a, 10b, 11’ which surprised me. I had not been aware of doing anything more than enjoying the view, and dabbing the stick this way and that.

Two hours in the air did not seem much from a whole day devoted to flying. But as I drove us back to Salsingham—the controls of the car felt absurdly firm and precise after the Thruster—I could not remember when I had felt so tired. My skin felt tight, too, where I had caught the sun.

The Watsons had told us there was a swimming pool, and we followed their directions down a path through a wood to a magnificent walled garden lined with peaches and quinces and pears and collapsing glasshouses. On one side through a door of flaking green paint was an oval pool with matching, opaque green water. It felt icy. We decided it was tempting, but not tempting enough.

‘Look, Ants, I’m not blind. You can’t just fudge it and hope I’m not going to notice.’ It was lesson four, and we were having air speed problems again. Sean had put on his serious voice. His mood switched disconcertingly from one moment to the next. One minute we were bumbling past the Swaffham radio mast, to the south-west of the airfield, and he was larking about in the passenger seat, shouting ‘Aaaaaargh, my bollocks. My bollocks are being zapped by the radio waves. Gemme outta here,’ and he would make as if to clamber out of the plane. Then, without warning, he snapped to serious.

To tell the truth, my attention had wandered. Having forgotten, for a few minutes, to keep an eye on the air speed indicator, I had sneaked a look while Sean was in his flippant mode and noticed that it was hovering around the forbidden 40 knot mark. So I had surreptitiously eased the stick forward to lower the nose and raise my speed. Unfortunately this didn’t seem to make any difference (I had yet to learn about time-lag in instrument readings). The needle continued to drop, so I had eased the nose down further, hoping Sean would not notice until the reading had recovered, only to receive a sharp reprimand a moment later for incorrect attitude3 and losing height.

‘Come on. You’re meant to be flying straight and level. That doesn’t mean up and down. This is important. I mean it. So get that silly smirk off your face and stop dicking around.’ ‘Dicking around’ was one of Sean’s favourite expressions, employed to cover a multitude of sins: lapses of concentration, imprecise flying, unconfident manipulation of the controls, lax or absent airmanship, starting the engine without chocking the wheels—the reason for the undignified, though not infrequent, sight of a microlight departing, pursued on foot by its unfortunate captain—or, most of all, the antics of other members of the club, usually those of its hapless proprietor Carter. ‘Look at him, now,’ Sean would say, craning his neck to watch as a distant speck pottered out of the club Portakabin to attend to a fibreglass pond and rockery he was installing by the corner of the hangar. ‘A strange, strange man, that. Never stops dicking around, does Carter.’

How much I learned during those early lessons, it is hard to assess, as Sean’s instructions, even at his most incensed, impinged little on my happy reverie. Feeling that there was no immediate pressure to prove myself, most of the time I just sailed about the sky in a contented, vacuous daze, savouring the warm air and the fine view. By lesson five, however, on Monday morning, hard evidence was beginning to accrue—or so it felt—of stupidity, incompetence, laziness, hamfisted-ness, mal co-ordination and inability to concentrate, and Sean was beginning to assert himself with some asperity.

I still approached the controls of the Thruster as someone used to the controls of a car. Their effects, however, were bizarrely different. In a plane, increasing the throttle did not make you go faster, or not by much. It made you go up. Likewise, reducing the revs didn’t slow you down; it made you lose height. This (needless to say) wasn’t quite true: if you held the plane level and ‘turned up the wick’, then she went a bit faster. Cruising speed was the minimum throttle setting at which it was possible to maintain height.

In flying, two things mattered: speed and height. These were the vital commodities. Speed was what kept you airborne, what kept the air flowing over the wing: drop below the magical ‘stall speed’ and the wing ceased to be a wing and simply became a piece of debris an uncomfortably long way above the ground. Height, I was learning, was fuel; by putting the nose down, it could always be turned into speed. If things went wrong, height gave you time to recover or to find somewhere to land. It was said to be one of the ironies of aviation that the two things that made your mother think it was dangerous—speed and height—were actually the only things that kept you safe. As an old pilots’ saying ran, ‘In flying, you need speed, you need height, or you need ideas.’

Then there was the air. Wind, I knew, from Geography at school and The Microlight Pilot’s Handbook, was air moving from a high pressure area to a lower pressure area. The flyer, of course, was part of the wind (which is why, in a balloon, all is completely still: you are part of the breeze). But, used to looking at the speedometer of a car and getting an accurate reading, it was bemusing to find in a plane that while the air speed might be a steady 55 knots, we might be moving across the ground at 20 knots, or 80 knots. The point being that the moment you were airborne you ceased to be part of the landscape and became part of the air blowing across it.

Turning was another strange one. Again, in a car, you turned the steering wheel when you wanted to go left, then turned it back again to straighten up or go to the right. Always, in the back of your mind, you knew roughly where the wheels were pointing and that they were pointing in the direction you were going. In flying it was not like that at all. Once you had initiated, say, a left turn, by giving it some left stick (plus some left rudder, of course), you did not then hold the stick there, as you would a car steering wheel, until you wanted to straighten up again or go in a new direction. No, having started the plane turning, you then returned the stick to the centre, and the plane kept turning. To cancel the turn you applied an equal blat of opposite stick. I relate these facts simply and clearly here, as if that is how they presented themselves to me. But whether because Sean never explained them properly, or failed to emphasise them enough, or because my mind was simply overloaded trying to cope with all the other things I was supposed to be thinking about, they did not become clear for a very long time. And until I did understand them, I continued timorously to dab the stick this way then that, holding it in place like a steering wheel as the turn steepened, not having the least comprehension of the consequences of my actions.