Antony Woodward - Propellerhead

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 attitude 3 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.