Propellerhead

The Thruster was a sorry sight. Her propeller was broken, splintered at both ends. Several spars were bent. The pod was torn and gashed on one side. Dust, straw and heads of corn littered the cockpit. With the arrival of the combine from the adjoining field—the farmer obligingly cut a swathe up to and around the Thruster—clouds more dust and chaff were blown into every nook they had not already reached. ‘She lost all power,’ began Richard. ‘I went as far as I could but I couldn’t maintain height.’

‘They’re so reliable, these engines. So reliable,’ said Sean, shaking his head and making what point I’m not sure as he set to with a spanner. ‘Are you sure you weren’t hearing things?’

I do not know whether I was expecting some kind of apology or, at least, some word of regret from Richard. If I was, I didn’t get it.

‘So it didn’t exactly fail,’ I said, realizing, as I said it, that it was perhaps not the most helpful comment to have made. Irritated by Richard’s bland lack of remorse or—I suppose—injury, I wanted to prompt some reaction out of him. He said nothing. ‘Well, so long as you’re all right. That’s the main thing,’ I said, viciously.

It was nine thirty and getting dark before we dropped our sad freight—de-rigged, on the farmer’s trailer—back at the hangar. She looked very forlorn as, in the darkening gloom, we laid the wings on the dusty cement of the hangar floor, then manhandled the pod and fuselage into a corner. I wanted Sean to reassure me that the Thruster could be mended tomorrow and we could be flying again by tomorrow afternoon, that I could still get my licence by the end of next week. He saw my face. ‘Look, this is flying. It happens. At least no one got hurt.’

As Richard and I drove home neither of us spoke. Partly it was tiredness. But there was an unresolved heaviness between us, something more than tiredness and disappointment. Nor was anything said next morning, when we watched Sean, notebook in hand, pick carefully over the Thruster to order up the necessary parts. In fact, neither of us ever mentioned the incident again.

We were now at a loose end. We had booked two weeks holiday and it was only Thursday of the first week. It was going to take a couple of days at least for the replacement parts to arrive, a couple more after that for Sean to find time to fit them (this was his busiest time of year). I was bitterly disappointed. We debated reading by the pool at Salsingham. But on Friday morning we were discovered by Mr Watson and, after assisting him to clear a land drain, it became clear that lasting peace was not to be found there.

Over the next few days we drove up to the north Norfolk coast near Holkham, drank in pubs and walked on the beach. We joined the queues of cars that threaded their way around the Broads. We visited Houghton Hall. We went to see films in Norwich. It was fine; if only it was what we had wanted to be doing. As if to taunt us, the heat wave continued: each morning dawned insolently cloudless, windless and perfect. By the following Tuesday night, Sean had the Thruster back in one piece. The pod was still cracked like an eggshell in two places, with splints of glass fibre poking out of the tear. Straw and stray seeds of corn were still lodged in corners and crevices. The wings and tail had picked up a number of minor scuffs and gashes and streaks of oil and grime in transit.

We had four days of holiday left, but by then the weather had turned. The sky was overcast and the wind had got up. It was too blustery, Sean said, for novice instruction. I fitted in two more lessons, mainly at my insistence, but I seemed to have forgotten everything. With just eight hours recorded in my log book, I returned to London.

Despite the disappointment of the holiday, the sun seemed to have come back out on life. Advertising was booming. Creative departments, which had an evocative (pre-digital) aroma of Magic Markers, Spraymount and ArtClean were exciting places to work. My days alternated pleasantly between flirting with three minxy secretaries, sitting in our Chinatown office with my feet on the desk trying to shoe-horn celebrities I wished to meet into scripts, and trying to swing location shoots. I spent happy periods pottering in Soho and got out of the office on periodic factory visits or to one of the sound studios, editing suites or post-production facilities sprinkled through the basements of Soho. When times were quiet, I went to matinée cinema performances in Leicester Square. Voice-over recordings gave me the chance to patronise famous actors like John Hurt and Ian Holm (‘Bit more emphasis on the ‘U’ please, John. Equip-U-Office Equipment. That’s it, John, you’ve got it’).

We now automatically headed for Norfolk every weekend unless there was an overpowering reason not to. For some reason, the image from Out of Africa where Meryl Streep reaches back for Robert Redford’s hand in the flying scene above the clouds had lodged in my head. Already, I had visions of the Thruster carrying myself and a young model or actress that I might shortly meet on a shoot or at a casting session, plus a bottle or two of champagne and, perhaps, a few blinis, to a quiet area of Holkham beach. A slightly different version found us amongst the cow parsley of a shaded but sun-dappled corner of some unknowing farmer’s field, wrestling for the last morsel of a ripe peach as the juice ran down our chins. All that lay between me and these promising daydreams was the minimum twenty-five hours of flying time (with instructor or supervised solo), my General Flight Test, and a few straightforward multiple-choice ground exams. I imagine some similar idea was in Richard’s head.

Accordingly, we fell into a more-or-less standard routine. On Friday night we would drive up to Salsingham, ready for me to take a lesson with Sean the next morning. In the afternoon I would switch to the passenger seat, and Richard, now fully legal, and I would head off together on a cross-country flight. On Sunday the process would be repeated, after which, tired but fulfilled, we would head back to London. This was the idea anyway. But the weather did not return to the clement skies of our summer holiday, and with Sean a lot busier at weekends it was hard to determine how instructive these weekends were. With less time to become immersed in the flying, I often arrived for my lesson still distracted by the week’s unsolved advertising problems and unmet deadlines. The period between putting away the Thruster on Sunday evening, and getting back into the cockpit (if all went well) the following Saturday morning, seemed like a lifetime.

By the end of August I could take off and fly straight and level pretty competently (as, Richard pointed out, anyone could). I could feel if the nose was too high or too low. I could do gentle and medium turns, both climbing and descending. And I could do full-power steep turns sufficiently accurately that the ball of the slip indicator remained roughly central in its window, and I felt the blast of air of my own wake as I completed the turn (Sean’s more rough and ready definition of a perfect turn). Descending, I didn’t need to check the air speed indicator to know when I was going between 50-55 knots: I could feel by the back pressure on the stick.

However, when it came to landing, everything went to pieces.

I just could not get it right. Some people, I suppose, simply have a better sense of space and distance than others. I found the whole exercise of gauging an even, controlled descent from an altitude of around 1,000 feet down to a few feet off the ground at a specified spot in the landscape, by co-ordinated adjustment of throttle, ailerons, elevators and rudder, virtually impossible. Even if I did manage it, once I was down to near ground level, getting the Thruster smoothly onto the turf was another matter altogether. All might be well down to fifteen or ten feet from the ground. Sean would say something encouraging like ‘Nice. Very nice. That’s a perfect approach. This is going to be good, I can feel it.’ Then, when we were a foot or two from the ground, it would all go wrong. I would flare out (the action of rounding from a descending attitude to a level one just above the surface of the runway) too early, stall too high above the ground, crash down and bounce. I would flare out too late, slam into the ground, and bounce. Even if I flared out just right, and got the wheels onto the ground, she just would not stay there. With a mind of her own she would leap into the air again in a series of terrific balloons and kangaroo-like bounces. Each time Sean would have to take over and bring her back under control. Lesson after lesson went by doing nothing but landings, landings and landings.

At one stage I thought I had it, and so did Sean. ‘One more like that,’ he would say, ‘and you can go solo.’ Then I would mess up the next one. It became a familiar routine. Each lesson he would say, ‘Right. We’ll get you solo this time Ants,’ and the end of the lesson would come and the matter wouldn’t be mentioned again. At other times he would say, doubtfully, ‘I don’t know, Ants, maybe I should send you solo. It might be the best way.’

It began to depress me. My knowledge—buttressed by Sean’s repeated assurances—that the Thruster was, even by tail-dragger standards, an exceptionally difficult plane to land, had made it an exciting challenge to start with. But any reassurance that had conferred had long since begun to ring hollow. The others, including Dan, had all gone solo ages ago.

I constructed reasons and explanations for myself. Richard had already done his licence. So had Mr Watson. Dan, living in Norfolk, had access to the plane in good weather on a regular basis, while I had to take my chances at weekends: in any one hour lesson I got, at the most (by the time I had completed each circuit), only eight attempts at landing. But the fact remained that I had now done eleven hours of flying—twenty-five if you included my hours in Africa—and I still hadn’t gone solo. It had become an issue. In every account of learning to fly that I had read, the subject had gone solo in a quarter of the time. Roald Dahl in Going Solo had done it in seven hours forty minutes. Cecil Lewis in Sagittarius Rising had soloed his Maurice Farman Longhorn after an hour and twenty minutes. An hour and twenty minutes. I even recalled that James Herriot had learnt to fly and when I looked up Vet in a Spin I discovered he had done it in nine hours. In the Battle of Britain seventeen-year-olds—seventeen-year-olds—were flying Spitfires—Spitfires—after the time I had been flying. I began to feel resentful and bitter. Why did the plane have to be stuck in Norfolk? Why was I saddled with such a lousy instructor? Why was I pouring money into this pointless activity?

I had almost accepted that landing aeroplanes was one of those talents, like rolling hose-pipes or folding maps, that either you had or hadn’t when, one showery Saturday morning on the last day of August, I did three passable landings in succession—and Sean told me to take her up alone. ‘Remember, with only one, she’ll climb much faster,’ he said. I felt far from confident.

Sean was right. Without a passenger aboard I seemed to be in the air almost before the throttle was fully open. She leapt off the ground, and once airborne seemed much lighter too, bouncing around a lot more. I was at 800 feet, the height at which I normally executed a gentle climbing turn into the crosswind leg, before I was two thirds of the way down the runway. It felt hideously lonely looking to my right and seeing, where Sean should have been, just an empty seat, with the safety harness buckled across it. By the time I reached the point where I normally turned crosswind I was already at 1,200 feet and realised that I should be levelling off. I reduced the power to the usual 5,700 rpm, but the Thruster continued to climb furiously—1,250, 1,300, 1,400 feet. I had to reduce the power to 5,000 rpm before the altimeter needle finally held steady. As I repeated Sean’s rule to myself (‘Attitude, Power, Trim’), for the first time I remembered the trimmer; I had forgotten to set it at all. Already it was time to turn onto the downwind leg. And—what was I thinking of?—I was almost halfway round the circuit and I hadn’t given a thought to what would happen if the engine failed. I should have been scouring the ground for suitable fields. And this is what I was busy doing when, suddenly, I was engulfed in cloud.

I didn’t see it coming. It must have been some low stuff, sweeping across on the breeze, as it had been all morning. I must have climbed into its path by levelling off so high.

Had I kept my head I might have guessed that, if I only lost a little height or maintained my heading for a few moments, I must soon get clear. I was in no mood for keeping my head however: this was my first solo. Suddenly engulfed in a dense, impenetrable white-out, my stripped, disorientated senses screamed helplessly for information. I scanned the instruments desperately for clues. But my mind refused to tell me what was relevant and what was not. Which dial could help? What information mattered? The readings began to leap out at me as my eyes flicked from one to another. Not to stall, that was the main thing; so I opened the throttle and lowered the nose.

After a few moments more, my only clear sensation was that I was about to fall out of the left-hand side of the cockpit: I could actually feel my weight against the strap of the harness. So to level the plane, I moved the stick tight. This failed to correct the sensation which in fact grew stronger. So I moved the stick as far right as it would go. Knowing I should accompany this with some right rudder, for a moment I became transfixed by trying to centre the ball in the slip indicator.

Then, as suddenly as it arrived, the cloud was gone. I was spiralling in a near vertical right-hand turn over the centre of what should have been my final approach. There was the airfield directly ahead. My spell of blind flying must have lasted a matter of thirty or forty seconds at the most.

I levelled the wings, reduced the power and got her down. It was not great. I bounced a couple of times. But I got her down. The relief was overwhelming. I had done it. It had been close, but I had gone solo and brought the aircraft and myself back in one piece. The cloud which had contributed so much grief had disappeared as fast as it had come and already, as I started to taxi back to the hangar, the sun was shining. Everything seemed so normal and ordinary and safe now I was back on the ground. There was Sean standing by the hangar chatting to someone; it didn’t look as if he had even noticed my drama. There was a Cessna, starting its engine. The terror in the clouds of just a few minutes before seemed from another world. It felt ridiculous and absurd to feel so shaken. ‘There you are, Ants, wasn’t so bad was it?’ said Sean.

‘No problem,’ I said.

I could not manage a smile.

The flight entry in my log book for 31 August at 11.40 was the first where, in the ‘Captain’ column, the word ‘SELF’ appeared, instead of Sean’s name. The flight lasted ten minutes. In the ‘Remarks’ column, Sean wrote in his characteristic handwriting, ‘17a’, which consultation of the necessary manuals would reveal as ‘solo flight’. It ought to have been a red-letter day, the most significant of any pilot’s training, and it was, in a way. I had done it, it was true. I was equal with the others again. On the other hand, it had not been quite the neat, clean, tidy line between the uncertainty of the past and the promise of the future that I might have hoped. I had winged it, and I knew it.

Sean suggested that I have lunch, then afterwards go out and do an hour or two of circuits and bumps to consolidate the good work. But by three o’clock the showery weather had set in, the wind was gusty, and, almost relieved, I had to call it a day.

The next day, the first of September, was fine and clear. As I took off to do some circuits, it felt almost normal to be alone in the Thruster. I did two circuits; the landings went all right, and I began to relax. But on my third circuit, as I came in to land, the machine went into a series of the old, kangaroo bounds. They were hard ones, too, each one sending her bucking and vaulting back into the air, higher and higher. Uncertain what to do, I jabbed the stick this way, then that, in an effort to regain control. To no avail. The bounces seemed to get bigger and more and more uneven, as the Thruster crashed heavily down first on one wheel, then the other. One descent was so dramatic that I thought she might go right over onto her nose. I cut the engine completely, and finally she came to rest.

It had been close, there was no question of that: I had been lucky to get away with it. I got out, started the engine and made to taxi back to the hangar. However, I found that I had to rev the engine nearly to full throttle to get her to move at all. The controls, too, had become stiff and awkward. She would not taxi in a straight line: only in an ungainly crabbing motion to the right. Distraught and furious with self-hatred, engine screaming to overcome the resistance, I finally got her to the hangar where I sheepishly confessed to my ‘hard’ landing. Sean cast an expert eye over her, ducking his head over and under the pod. He narrowed his eyes. He wagged the stick backwards and forwards. He chewed his bottom lip. Then he made his pronouncement.

‘A write-off,’ he said. ‘If not, a complete rebuild.’

He was right. To my innocent eye the plane might hardly have looked damaged, but closer inspection revealed the awful truth. Almost every spar and strut and joining plate was very slightly wrenched out of true, or bore the tiny tell-tale stretch marks, whitening or slight distortion that indicated buckling, twisting, fatigue or strain. Several people in the clubhouse, it transpired, had enjoyed a ring-side view of my performance, and with grinding teeth I contemplated what they must have said to each other. ‘Thought you were going to go over there for a moment,’ said one with a smile. ‘Didn’t really hold off enough, did you?’ said another. I didn’t know what he meant, but the cautious confidence which had followed my solo flight of the day before, evaporated. I felt humiliated and ashamed. The thought of confessing to the Watsons made me squirm. It was hardly as if there were mitigating cirumstances: it was a perfect, still, summer’s day, in a nearly new machine, performing faultlessly on the largest grass airfield in Europe. And I had written off the plane. What a pilot.

For me personally, of course, the implications were severer still. I might have gone solo, but what was the gain? With flying suspended for the foreseeable future, the incontrovertible evidence remained: I still could not land.

The Cows Just Got Smaller

New Rules of the Air 1998

Rule 1: If it is not too windy, it will be too wet to fly today.

Rule 2: If it is not too windy or too wet, it will be too unstable to fly today.

Rule 3: If it is not too windy, too wet or too unstable, it will be too cold to fly today.

Rule 4: If it is not too windy, too wet, too unstable or too cold, the visibility will be too low to fly today.

Rule 5: If it is not too windy, too wet, too unstable, too cold or too murky to fly today, the aircraft will be unserviceable.

Rule 6: If it is calm, dry, stable, warm and clear today, and the aircraft is serviceable, you will have unbreakable commitments elsewhere.

Professor B.J. Brinkworth, Microlight Flying, November 1998

For weeks the mere thought of flying made me miserable and depressed. Mr Watson’s stupefied, ‘What? Not again!’ when I had informed him that the Thruster would be out of action ‘for a short time’, still rang witheringly in my ears. The first invoices of what Sean promised would be a considerable repair bill had already come in, and I was having seriously to entertain the possibility that landing the machine was altogether beyond me (I wasn’t sure how keen I was to get back into the cockpit, anyway). In fact, if it had been possible to back out of the whole project at that point, pay off the Watsons, and bail out, I might have done so. Unfortunately, it wasn’t.

There had already been far too much easy talk about our aerial exploits, both to the girls at work and amongst my friends. The Watsons—especially Mr Watson—Salsingham, Sean, Carter, the Thruster, the ‘Norwich and Eastern’—all were rich seams to mine in banter and chat, and mined they had been, to capacity. The London flat, The Rachel Papers-fashion, had become propped with flying paraphernalia: photographs of us and the Thruster taken on our July holiday, Barsham Green, Salsingham, the Thruster in the cornfield. One of our big 1:500,000 aviation charts of the south of England decorated the kitchen wall, and very impressive it looked, with all its control zones and airways (especially around Heathrow and Gatwick). Books with titles like Advanced Aerobatics, Bush Pilot, Mountain Flying and Weather for Pilots had found their way onto the table in the living room, along with one of our rulers graduated in nautical miles. A flight calculator sat on the stereo. In the bathroom, Flightline had joined the rumpled soaked-and-dried-out copies of The Face and Richard’s copies of the Spectator.

The two awkward incidents that neither of us mentioned to each other, we found ways of glossing over to friends. Richard’s accident was a typical example of the kind of life-threatening situation that these machines routinely placed one in; the tacit implication being that only quick reflexes and presence of mind had saved him. Our present lack of an aircraft—with its absence of a single mitigating circumstance—merely served to underline what dogs to handle they were, even under the very best flying conditions.

And it worked. Already we had acquired a gratifying whiff of romantic daring and amateur enterprise, which we made no attempt to play down. Microlighting was still an eccentric novelty sport. We had become known as ‘the aviators’. People talked about us. I was too far down the runway—so to speak—to pull out. I was ‘committed’. Besides, from a purely personal angle, it would have been unacceptable to admit defeat now. The Thruster had begun to annoy me. I could still hear Geoff’s stinging challenge from the Popham trip: ‘a lot of people find it impossible…only a few can learn to land a tail-dragger’.

It was November before the Thruster was ready. After the two months back in London, the Watsons and the events of the summer had already become as remote and unreal as a half-remembered dream. Even Richard had disappeared from my life, having been sent away to a regional branch of the bank for one of his interminable training courses. But Guy Fawkes day, a Saturday, found me standing in the hangar with Sean—my first solo trip to Norfolk—inspecting the repaired Thruster.

The cockpit had been completely rebuilt. There were new aluminium spars, new wing struts and, in place of the former ‘flimsy’ (Sean’s word, not mine) aluminium main axle linking the leaf springs of the undercarriage—the part which took the brunt of the strain of any heavy landing—he had inserted a stout box-sectioned girder of mild steel. ‘To stop you culling her again, hopefully,’ he said. Even with all her new parts, the Thruster still bore signs of her skirmishes. Sean had not had time to repair the gashes in the pod from Richard’s accident (there were still grains of corn, chaff and straw in nooks and crevices), and the wings, from their second sojourn on the hangar floor, had acquired more smears of oil and grime.