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‘Not often enough.’
I was beginning to get a fix on Geoff.
‘What happens then?’ As the question came out, I realised how foolish it was. Before I had a chance to rephrase it, he had cut the engine.
‘Like this, you mean? Let’s see, shall we?’
In fact he didn’t stop it completely. But he reduced it to such a lazy idling tick-over that it felt as if he had. Compared to the racket of a second before, it seemed like silence.
‘See? She glides just fine. All you do is pick yourself a field and down you go.’ We were losing height rapidly. ‘People with Cessnas…’—he had a way of saying the word which made it sound like having lice—‘People with Cessnas can fly their whole life without ever having an engine failure.’ It sounded like an indictment against the Board and Directors of the Cessna company. ‘Trouble is, when they do…’
He opened up the throttle and we began to climb again.
‘These days aircraft engines run forever,’ he went on. ‘Makes you take them for granted. Makes you lazy. Makes you assume it’ll never happen. But this—’ Here a tone of warm affection re-entered his voice. ‘This doesn’t have an aircraft engine. This has a two-stroke designed for a Snowmobile, not made to strain away at high revs all the time. You’re bound to get a failure now and again. Part of the fun. That’s what makes you a real pilot. Engine failures keep you on your toes. Never get them and you never expect them.’
‘What about the other kind of microlight? The flexwing kind?’
While waiting for our trial flight in the clubhouse, it had been explained to us that there were two different types of microlight. There was the more primitive weight-shift kind, known as ‘flexwings’, which were controlled by a rudimentary bar, and were basically hang-gliders with an engine. And there were the more sophisticated ‘three-axis’ or ‘fixed-wing’ machines, like the one I was in now, which had a fixed wing that made it look more or less like a normal aeroplane—albeit one that appeared in the pretty early pages of any history of flight. These fixed-wing, three-axis machines were controlled ‘in three axes’ by the conventional aviation controls of a stick and rudder.
‘A trike?’ (How many names did these machines have, I wondered.) ‘All right. If you like that kind of thing. Easy to fly. Bit boring. Most people prefer it.’
‘You think this is better?’
‘This needs something you don’t need to fly a trike. Or a Cessna.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Skill.’
‘Ah. Ha-ha-ha.’
‘It’s true. The Thruster is a tail-wheel aeroplane, like the Spitfire and the Lancaster and all the great planes. That means it’s much more difficult to land. Lot of people find it impossible. Don’t get it just right, and she’ll bounce. Anyone can pancake a plane with a trike undercarriage onto the ground, but only a few can learn to land a tail-dragger. If in doubt, I’d go for a trike.’
We were descending again. The A303 re-appeared beneath us and there, alongside it, was the airfield. With a hiss, a film of drizzle covered the windshield. As we came in to land, I grasped the A-frame with my left hand; we appeared to be about to fly straight into the ground. As the moment of impact approached, I braced myself, but the bump never came. By the time I realised we had landed, we were bowling along the grass towards the clubhouse where Richard was waiting for his turn.
As I sat in the clubhouse, sipping a cup of coffee, my cheeks were burning. I could only have been up for fifteen minutes, but my hangover had disappeared. There had been more flying sensations in fifteen minutes with him than in all my lessons in a Cessna in Africa. I looked around the room. There were several tables. At one, two men pored over an air chart surrounded by books, rulers, protractors and marker pens, periodically pushing buttons on a calculator and filling in boxes on a printed form. At others, people drank cups of tea or coffee, chatted or read magazines. Under a glass counter were text books, manuals, cassettes, log books, woven cap badges, rulers and objects which looked like circular slide rules for sale. Notices on pinboards covered every wall. ‘Think Noise Abatement’, said one. ‘Think Hedgerow, not Heathrow’, said another. ‘Beware Spinnning Propellers’ (here a Ralph Steadman drawing of someone having their head sawn off by a propeller). There were abstruse-looking meteorological charts, weather reports and maps of the local area with shadings and markings all over them, and similar-looking charts for the whole of the south of England. There were line-drawn maps on architects’ paper with shading all over them marked ‘Airspace Classifications’ and identical maps with different shading marked ‘Areas of Intense Aerial Activity’. There were pictures of microlights with headlines saying ‘The Safest Way to Make the Earth Move’. And, more exotically, a poster: ‘Imported by Plane? Drugs Kill’ and ‘Coast Watch: Have You Seen Anything Suspicious?’ There was an advertisement board with photographs of planes for sale, and other notices: ‘Alençon Trip’, ‘le Touquet Trip’, ‘Sherborne Farm Fly-in and BBQ’.
On one side, a man sat behind a counter next to a radio set. Periodically this burst into life with a blast of static and a stream of incomprehensible pilot-speak: ‘Sierra zulu downwind zero eight.’ Mainly this was ignored, but sometimes the man would pick up the mouthpiece, press a button, and say crisply something like: ‘Sierra zulu wind one two zero fifteen repeat one two zero fifteen QFE one zero one two report finals.’ I faintly wished that I understood what he meant.
I finished my coffee and wandered up the field, booting clouds of moisture from the sodden clumps of grass. I wondered how difficult ‘difficult to land’ could be. (If we ever got a microlight, I had already decided that there was no way it was going to be a ‘flexwing’.) I wondered how Richard was getting on—given his fractious, hung-over condition of earlier in the day—in particular how he had received the information that flying a Cessna was like driving a Sierra. I could rely on the fact that he would have told Geoff he had his pilot’s licence.
‘Did you find that man as irritating as I did?’ said Richard cheerfully as we made our way back to the car. He still had flattened hair, red ears and white pressure marks from the crash helmet; his face was pink, his eyes were bright and his nose was running. As we headed into London, the weather began to clear—a routine development, I would learn, at the end of a flying day.
‘…Yes, not bad, not bad. Very different to a Cessna, of course. But not bad at all’, said Richard. ‘What’s it called again?’
‘A Thruster.’
‘Yes, at least it’s like a proper aircraft. Stick and rudder. Did you see those other things? They looked like kites.’
‘What about the landing? How difficult do you think that can be?’
‘Landing?’ said Richard. ‘Why should there be any problem with landing? Look at the people who do it.’ Richard’s spirits were completely restored and I noticed that I was in a better mood than I had been in for months.
It did not strike us until much later that Geoff was an excellent salesman.
95% of the people who own light planes today can’t afford to own them.
A Gift of Wings, Richard Bach
A new Thruster cost £12,000. A private pilot’s licence to fly it required a minimum of twenty-five hours flying time (though we had been warned to allow a great deal more on account of the