Майкл Ридпат - Fatal Error

‘Really? Are you going to make a move?’

It was a question I had been asking myself ever since I had last seen her. The truth was, I wasn’t sure. There was no doubt I liked her, and I thought she liked me. But I didn’t want to screw up our friendship.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Go for it,’ said Guy, the master strategist. ‘I can get Mel to put in a good word.’

‘I don’t think that will be necessary.’

‘Hey! I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we go for a trip together for a long weekend in Golf Juliet? You, me, Mel and Ingrid. We could go to France. Or how about Scotland? I’ve always wanted to fly around the Hebrides. If my father’s serious about selling the plane I want to get the most use out of it I can this summer. What do you think?’

‘Sounds good.’

‘At the very least, you’ll get to know Ingrid better. At best...’

‘Are you trying to set me up?’

‘Of course I am. What’s the matter? Don’t you want to do it?’

I was slightly embarrassed at Guy trying to direct my love life, and I wasn’t even sure what my plans were for Ingrid if I even had any. Also, I had a big accounting exam the following week, for which I had done precious little work. I had performed very badly in the last exam after a heavy night out with Guy, and I had been warned by my boss to ‘pull my socks up’ this time. But a trip to Scotland would be fun. I’d worry about my socks later.

‘Yeah, I do,’ I said. ‘It’s a good idea.’

We all met at seven thirty on a wet, cloudy Friday morning at Elstree aerodrome. Guy and I whipped the covers off the plane and walked round to make sure everything was as it should be.

‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ asked Ingrid doubtfully, looking up at the sky, a roof of thick grey only a few hundred feet above us.

‘It’ll be fine,’ said Guy. ‘My rating lets me fly through this. I’ve checked the weather and the sun’s shining in Scotland. All we have to do is get there.’

I sat in the front next to Guy, with Ingrid and Mel in the rear seats. The Cessna 182 was one of the few single-engined planes powerful enough to carry four people and enough fuel to go any distance. We took off, and within a few seconds we were in cloud. A minute later, and we were above it.

We skimmed along on autopilot up the backbone of England a couple of hundred feet above the clouds, being passed from RAF controller to controller. We didn’t need it: ours was the only aircraft in the sky that early in the morning. I had only a few hours’ training under my belt, I hadn’t even done my first solo flight, but I was fascinated to watch Guy. He had already told me a lot about how the Cessna worked, and now he told me more.

As we reached the Clyde the cloud began to break and Guy lowered the aircraft beneath it. We crept along the Firth of Clyde through the gloom, passing low over a nuclear submarine and its attendant helicopter, skipped through a gap in the hills by the Crinan Canal, and emerged into glorious sunshine. Suddenly the sea changed from murky grey to brilliant blue, with patches of turquoise and cyan. Everywhere we looked there was sea, coastline, rocks, inlets and mountains. It was very difficult to tell what was the mainland and what was island. In the back, the women stopped talking and started looking. It was unbelievably beautiful.

We reached the south coast of Mull and followed it along until we passed over the monastery at Iona, a cluster of white and stone buildings clinging to the edge of the world. Guy descended to a hundred feet and we sped across the water towards the island of Staffa and Fingal’s Cave. At that height we could see right into the cave, with its black basalt columns. A couple of sightseeing boats rocked as we flew over and a flock of birds rose into the air in protest. We followed the north coast of Mull, passed low over an impossibly romantic castle and climbed for the approach to Oban, where we had planned to land for fuel and food. Guy dodged the mountain that blocked the approach path and landed the Cessna expertly, with the barest whisper from the wheels as we touched down.

We had lunch at a hotel close to the airfield. The girls, who had been showing signs of advanced boredom as we had droned over the English cloud, had come alive. We sat in the garden of the hotel, the heat of the sun tempered by a pleasant sea breeze, congratulating ourselves on not being in London. In the afternoon Guy planned to take us up between the Inner Hebrides and the mainland to Broadford, a small airfield on the Isle of Skye. We would spend the following day walking, before nipping over to Barra in the Outer Hebrides in the evening and then home the day after that.

I noticed that Guy drank a couple of pints and it made me uneasy. I also felt foolish. I knew Guy was an experienced pilot and I knew he could handle his drink, but I also knew that he was breaking the rules. Of course, that was the difference between him and me. He broke the rules and I didn’t. Although as a student pilot I wasn’t allowed to handle the controls without a qualified instructor, I restricted myself to a Coke, as if reducing the average intake of alcohol in the cockpit would help.

We returned to the airfield and refuelled. I checked the weather fax. I had just completed the meteorology paper in my pilot’s course and found the subject fascinating. What I read worried me. I went out to the apron and found Guy.

‘Here, come in and look at this,’ I said quietly.

He followed me into the caravan, which doubled as a control tower, and looked at the fax. Under Inverness it had the words ‘PROB 30 tempo tsra bkn0010cb’.

‘So?’ said Guy.

‘So doesn’t that mean thunderstorms?’

‘No, Davo, it means that in Inverness there’s a thirty per cent probability that for a temporary period there might be a thunderstorm. Inverness is on the east coast and we’re on the west.’

‘But isn’t Inverness the nearest place on the fax to Skye?’

Guy hesitated. ‘Maybe. But look outside. Where are the clouds? It’s a great day.’ He saw the doubtful look in my eyes. ‘They always say there’s a chance of thunder in the summer. It’s just the Met Office covering its arse. We see a thunderstorm, we fly around it, OK?’

‘OK,’ I nodded, reflecting how much happier I had been flying with Guy when I knew nothing about the subject myself.

We took off into clear skies and headed north along the craggy coastline, passing lighthouses, lochs, birds, crofts and castles. We nosed up the Sound of Sleat, past Mallaig towards the Kyle of Lochalsh. To our left were the dark mountains of Skye and to our right the Highlands. I looked over my right shoulder for Ben Nevis, which should have been about thirty miles behind us. I couldn’t see it. An enormous black cloud had suddenly appeared, rearing up over the mountains. It rose thousands of feet up into the sky, tapering into a tower that formed a flat white top. An ‘anvil’. It was a massive cumulonimbus. A thundercloud.

I had read about thunderclouds in my meteorology texts. They are a pilot’s worst enemy. Wind can make landing difficult, rain can make visibility tricky, but a thundercloud can shake an aeroplane to bits. In a big, mature thundercloud, warm air is dragged into the centre of the thunderstorm and thrust thousands of feet upwards, where it cools and rushes back towards the ground in a vicious downdraught. The resulting turbulence produces sudden shocks that an airframe is not designed to withstand.

I tapped Guy on the shoulder and pointed.

‘That’s OK,’ he said. ‘You often get cloud over mountains. We’ll be all right down here.’

We were approaching the shoulder of a hill that plunged down to the sound. We passed it and turned northwards. Right in front of us was a wall of black. The aeroplane shuddered a little, as if in nervous anticipation.