After more than 20 years, I am back in flight school
All I can say is aeroplanes have grown more complicate., Or is it just my age?
It’s taken a while, but I’ve just started my new flying course. Many years ago, I held a civil aviation pilot’s licence – two in fact, one for microlights, the other for conventional aeroplanes. I want to revalidate my flying licence.
I let my earlier licences lapse, life getting in the way of a different life, and I have been content enough, in the past eight years, to concentrate when I can on paragliding, having taken that up again in France in 2012. But flying a paraglider in the UK is a whole different box of frogs: weather issues, crowded hills, packed with wannabe glider pilots, rules everywhere, frequently enforced by dweeb-like irritating children. Freedom it is not.
In short, it’s not the flying I have enjoyed in the past, nor wish to enjoy now and in the future. I’ve been re-thinking what kind of flying I want and, trust me, I always want to fly, to be in the air, somewhere.
It came to me like a revelation recently that I wanted to go back to microlight (ultra-light) flying, in some form or another but, this time, flying an aeroplane with a lid over the pilot, that is, a cockpit.
Flying flex-wings (ie., the wing, directly) was where I started in 1990, but they have grown bigger and heavier to fly and, at my age, the biggest disadvantage is that non-existent cockpit. And so, I came to thinking about three-axis (that is a conventionally controlled) microlights, of which there are, today, many kinds.
I first flew in a C42 in Portugal, in March, 2020. I liked it, a big beefy aeroplane with a high wing and good forward and side visibility. It turned out my old instructor, down at Kemble in the Cotswolds, is using C42s in his flying school; serendipity or what?
Learning on one will be a challenge. Since I last flew solo, 20 years ago, in Cessnas and Pipers, including the dinky C150, the most produced civilian light aeroplane ever (24,000 built), a lot has changed. The C42, although categorised as an ultra-light, is a sight more complicated than a C150. (Confusingly, they are not made by the same company, the C42 is German, the C150 from the USA.)
This Tuesday just gone saw me in the cockpit of a Kemble Flying School C42, G-MEGZ, with my new instructor, Mark, taxiing down to the hold point for the Kemble grass runway. There was a cacophony of noise from the headset, Mark running through take-off procedures, the tower informing another pilot about the QNH and the QFE (pressure settings for the altimeter), the wind speed and direction.
Honestly? I felt overwhelmed. Mark handled the take off.
Then we were climbing away from the runway and ‘you have control’ in my headphones tells me I am now flying this machine, climbing to about 2,000 for an assessment of my skills, or lack of them. There is no time to admire the landscape unfolding underneath as we barrel along at 80 knots. That landscape always takes the breath away, it is so beautiful.
After a short, sharp discussion about my heavy-footed left boot on the rudder pedals, I find the aircraft is light on the stick as well as the rudder. A little later, however, we find the electric trim is playing up. To my mind, all this is too complicated: a small wheel, or a handbrake-style lever is what I am used to for trimming an aeroplane. (The trim is crucial to ‘balance’ an aeroplane in flight, to make it easier to fly.)
That electric trim, along with a digital display for engine revs and indicated airspeed, suggests more things to go wrong, not aids to the aviator, well, not this one. I wonder, briefly, if this aircraft is for me. Then I recall to myself that I am in charge as the pilot, not the machine I am in. I can use, or not, these ‘helpful’ additions – except for the trim system; I am stuck with that.
Flying is art as much as science and definitely about finesse, not a clumsy cack-handed use of the stick – or the rudder pedals. It means less is usually more and a light touch, a relaxed attitude, will always make for a better flight. I need to calm down.
Mark tells me this, not quite in those words: ‘relax’ he says, ‘especially on the stick’. It’s an old habit of mine and hard to dump. The best way to fly is to have just a tiny amount of back-pressure on that stick, enough to ‘feel’ the aeroplane and thus how it is flying. The trick, of course, is to have just enough: not too much, not too little. It will be a while before I get the knack for this particular aeroplane.
Meanwhile, we have been poodling along at 80+ knots, enough to place us the wrong side of the M4, with Lyneham, the old RAF transport base, now a massive solar farm, looming up in the right quadrant. We’re too far out for our purpose: it would take but a few moments before we infringed Bristol Airport’s FRZ.
We turn back – another revision lesson for me – toward the Severn estuary and clear – that is, unrestricted – airspace. To Mark’s commands, I climb us up through the clouds, always a moment of utter magic, as wisps of the stuff whip past. I fly a few more manoeuvres, then we turn for Kemble and the landing.
Once again, Mark takes control, although I follow through on both stick, rudder pedals and throttle. It’s a truism that anyone can learn to take off an aeroplane in a few minutes. Landing one takes many hard hours of practice, the vale of tears known to every trainee pilot as circuit bashing. I have that still to look forward to. How long I will have to suffer it is entirely down to me.
The landing is surprisingly frisky, the northerly cross-wind breeze having picked up a lot since we left the airfield, an hour ago. We land flapless to help us punch through that wind, so touching down at around 65 knots. It feels fast and it is fast. As I said, this aeroplane is a bit of a beast.
Mark asked me what I wanted to achieve and I told him I wanted to get my licence back by next spring, before my next (biggish) birthday. ‘Based on what I’ve seen today, it’s achievable,’ he says.
It’s more than enough for me. I taxi the aeroplane back to the flying school apron, and just shy of the hangar we shut down. Silence, golden silence for a while, just the wind soughing past, teasing the tail-plane and the wing.
We have a saying in our family. ‘Are you ‘appy?’ we ask of each other.
Today? Oh yes, ‘I’m ‘appy’.
This week: Tim has been delving some more into the 400-year old, 1,000+ page book, The Anatomy of Melancholy. I’ll help you out here. Robert Burton, the author, after over a thousand pages of extremely erudite exposition says his magnum opus might be condensed to this: Be not solitary, be not idle. As a prophylactic text for depression, that seems pretty good.