Antony Woodward - Propellerhead

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.

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.