Peter Mckay

The wonder of learning to fly

Nothing beats taking to the air when you’re piloting the plane yourself

We’d taken off smoothly and the two-seater Cessna 152 was climbing through 1,000 feet on full power. Then my instructor, Gill, reached over and closed the throttle. As the plane’s nose began to sink, she told me calmly, ‘We’ll simulate an emergency now. Can you find a suitable field to land in?’ Hurrying panic wouldn’t look good, I felt. On the other hand, finding somewhere more or less immediately might be appreciated. An empty-looking golf course fairway below looked promising. It had two sand bunkers, probably easier to avoid with a plane than a golf club, but what if previously unseen golfers pulling buggies strolled out of the trees into my flight path on touchdown? A lush-looking green field to the right looked big, firm and long enough. No people or animals. Not ploughed. Ploughed is a real no-no when it comes to landing aeroplanes.

‘OK, I think we’d walk away from landing there,’ said Gill, pushing the throttle back to full power. I’d passed another of the almost-constant little tests that shape pilot tuition. There are no good landings, I am told. They’re ‘landings you walk away from’. Learning to fly is necessarily concerned with how to avoid not flying, or crashing as it’s known in lay terms. The late David Frost, asked if he wasn’t afraid of the flying — he was travelling to New York twice a week to present a TV show at the time — replied: ‘Crashing, yes. Flying, no.’

The term ‘crashing’ is avoided by real pilots. ‘Bought the farm’ is popular. It’s thought to be from the 1950s when the families of US military pilots who had died in crashes received insurance payouts large enough to pay off farm mortgages. ‘Bought the plot’ was earlier RAF slang, which of course refers to funeral arrangements.

I belong to the Enstone Flying Club, near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, based at RAF Enstone, the former wartime bomber base.

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