Let me tell you a little bit about the brave men that have been teaching me to fly. Next to bullet-proof vest tester it is difficult to imagine a more dangerous occupation than flight instructor. Sure test pilots and astronauts get all the glory but long before a Red Arrow pulls high-G rolls 100’ from the deck some nameless flight instructor strapped in beside the guy in a spindly aluminium box and said, “OK, this is how you turn the engine on.”
My fight instructors do have names, Sam, Nayen, James and Roy and the reason I am here to tell you about them is because they have been, to a man, superb.
The obvious question is “Why so many? Were you that hopeless that it took four different guys to teach you how to fly?” Not at all. Well, OK, maybe a bit.
Like most want-a-be pilots I booked myself in for a trial lesson to see if the exhilaration of flying overcame the terror of being carted along several thousand feet above the ground by a single propeller.
Flight instructors, like hairdressers and taxi drivers, get paid a cut of the business they bring in. Trial lessons and “experience” flights are their chance to hook you onto both the airfield and their services. A tiny minority of those who do a trial lesson continue on with a course and an even smaller subset actually receives their PPLs.
Thus it is with a mixture of both hope and resignation that instructors take on trial flights. On the plus side they actually get to fly the aircraft for a bit and even show off a little. On the downside, taking streams of punters out over the exact same route and giving them the exact same spiel six or eight times a day would get very old very fast.
Who you fly with on that first day is, of course, the luck of the draw. You hope for someone about 55, grey hair and a voice like Chuck Yeagar. I got Sam Gowan. Tall, lanky and shaven headed, with a disarming smile and a Home Counties accent. 15 years my junior and sporting the Stapelford Uniform: black trousers, pressed white shirt with epaulets and a clip-on tie that was four inches too short. You would not think him out of place teaching A level maths at a public school. No one would ever look at him and say “pilot.”
My first flight with him was both a lesson and a trial. As we did the pre-flight checks he asked me loads of questions. Although he never said so, I am sure he was gauging whether or not I was just out there for a jolly or if I actually had any enthusiasm and/or aptitude for flying.
I’m assuming he was suitably impressed by my answers (and the fact that I knew the phonetic alphabet) because as we lined up on the runway he said, “OK, you can take off.” I pushed the throttle in, steered clumsily with the rudder pedals and at 60kts launched us inexpertly into the air.
Our flight took us about 20 miles to the east of the aerodrome, over Hanningfield reservoir and the Blackwater estuary. For the most part Sam let me do the flying while he told me what to do, handled the radio and watched out for other traffic.
As we turned to make our way back to the airfield he asked me what I took as a very leading question, “Do you get motion sick?”
I looked at him. “Nope.” I said.
“Good.”
He took the controls and put the little Cessna into a wicked banking turn. He levelled off and did the same thing in the opposite direction.
“Want to go zero-G?”
“Oh yeah!”
Full power and a steep climb; at the top of the arch he cut the throttle and pitched us nose down; we floated into our harnesses.
“THAT WAS TOTALLY COOL!” I shouted. Sam just grinned his schoolboy grin. No fear. Total confidence in the aircraft and his abilities. This man was a professional and I felt slightly ashamed for thinking him too young
A few manoeuvres later Sam pointed us back to the airfield. He flew the pattern with a precision that I would only later appreciate fully (after struggling with it myself) and lined us up on final. He let me take the Cessna most of the way in, helping me out on the flare.
We pulled off the runway and taxied back to the stand. I would like to say that I had an epfany at that point and realized that I belonged in the sky. Sadly, this was not the case. I was buzzing with excitement and liked the adrenaline rush but there was an undercurrent of fear as well.
As I rode back to the Tube in the taxi I contemplated what continuing with flight training entailed, and how much it would cost. Part-time, it would take me months to complete the minimum hours, not to mention the theoretical exams, navigation and skills test. Nothing, at that point, felt natural. Every action had at least two other unexpected reactions that were completely beyond my ability to predict or anticipate. I had no confidence that I possessed either the coordination or mental capacity to complete the course.
Then there was the actual flying. One of the great ironies of my life is that I have always adored airplanes, worshiped pilots and have been completely terrified of flying. I would go years without setting foot on a plane and when necessity dictated that I must go aloft, I did so with fear and trepidation.
Years of being forced to fly for business finally beat most of the fear into the back of my consciousness. I always figured that the real fear wasn’t of flying, it was being in a position of powerlessness. In a small aircraft, under my own control, I reasoned that I would be more at ease, even if the actual piloting was challenging. It turns out that this line of thought was spot-on.
Surprisingly, there is no formal sign-up process for flight school, you simply keep showing up and they keep giving you lessons. It took me a while to realize that there was any kind of order to what I was being taught and that the lessons themselves had names and numbers (this oversight became a problem when I submitted my log-book to the CAA). I kept things loose, always figuring that I was just doing this for fun, not to get a license and that I could walk away at any time.
Yet week after week I was booking in sessions with Sam. I bought a knee board and headset, I read the course books constantly and took mock quizzes on-line. When Sam wasn’t available I went up with my other instructor, Nayan, just so I wouldn’t go too long without a lesson. What started out as a bit of fun was becoming something I was taking seriously. Something that I cared about and suddenly I started being afraid I would fail.
I’m not good at seeing things through. It is a miracle I finished high school, let alone college. I only stay at jobs as long as they are fun and best not ask me about relationships. The deeper I got into flying the more terrified I became that I would wash-out; that I would flunk the ground-school exams, get lost on my cross countries or punt my skills test. Like so many people I had constructed a life in which I didn’t have to try too hard at anything and now I was being pushed well outside my comfort zone.
And no one pushed me harder than Sam.
Sam Gowan has a way of getting you to do things you don’t want to do. He has a reputation around Stapelford of taking students up into weather that is right on the limits of what is flyable. Some might consider this a bit reckless but I would disagree. One rarely encounters a perfect day for flying, especially in England and if you don’t learn how to deal with difficult situations you’re going to be ill-prepared when you find yourself in one.
Sam sticks to the rules, or as he says, “Does it the right way.” One knot over the acceptable crosswind limit and we stay on the ground. However, one knot under and we’re going up. Sam holds an Airline Transport Pilots License (ATPL) with a full instrument rating, has a couple thousand hours under his belt and flies 100+ hours each month. Needless to say, in the air he is Total Confidence incarnate.
On one of our first lessons Sam told me, “There are old pilots and there are bold pilots but there are no old, bold pilots.” That has been my flying mantra ever since.
Flying is all about risk avoidance. No matter what you see in the movies, no one jumps into a jet and ten seconds later roars off. The start up checks for a 747 are pages long and even my little Cessna has nearly a hundred pre-flight checks that have to be preformed each an every time: half of those are before you even turn it on.
There are instrument checks every fifteen minutes in the air, navigation checks ever five minutes or so and the constant listening watch on the radio. Flying a light aircraft is the most focused activity imaginable and Sam was an expert at pointing out and correcting my multitude of mistakes.
For a PPL you are required to do a certain amount of flying on instruments. Normally this entails wearing a hood that blocks out your vision of everything but the instrument panel. The standard training consists of being able to maintain straight and level flight and do a basic rate 180 degree turn in case you inadvertently fly into a cloud. Sam never had me wear the hood; instead he just had me fly into the clouds.
I used to SCUBA dive. From day one my instructor would tell me that when visibility drops to zero underwater it is easy to get disoriented and swim down when you mean to go up. I never understood this. I experienced lots of blackout conditions underwater and I always knew which way was up because I could always drop or dangle something and see which way it fell. This doesn’t work in the air.
Flying into a cloud means losing all sense of direction, balance and perspective. The motion sensors in your ears short out and your eyes are no help at all. Even the pressure of gravity pushing you into the seat seems to fail. It is a helpless and utterly confusing situation.
It also happens to be totally cool, as long as you don’t kill yourself.
Inside a cloud there is no feeling of motion and nothing to gage speed or bank against. Instructors drive home the point of looking outside the aircraft to judge the correct angle of attack and bank; those rules don’t apply in zero vis. Your eyes are riveted to the dials and your focus gets very, very, sharp.
“So, you’re flying straight and level?” Sam asked.
“Uh…yeah?”
“You might want to check that.”
30 degrees of bank and a descending turn. Shit. I corrected. Two minutes later I was off kilter and dropping again. This time I was better prepared and levelled off before Sam said anything. The lesson progressed along these lines until I was able to hold course, speed and altitude with no visual references at all. Then came the really impressive part.
Sam told me to climb to 4,000’ holding my wings level. At about 3,500’ we popped out of the clouds and into dazzling sunlight. I’m telling you now, there is no experience on the rocky confines of earth that can match the beauty, the joy, of tiptoeing over candyfloss mountains in the sky. We were both struck dumb by the sight of it until Sam broke the silence and said, “This is why we fly.” Amen to that brother.