Thirty-Nine Years Ago Today

All By Myself

I published this post for my paid subscribers back in 2023 but thought I’d share it with everybody today. This could have been my diary entry thirty-nine years ago today:

I had seven hours and twenty minutes of flying time on the Piper PA-38 Tomahawk before I flew solo and I now have seven hours and thirty minutes having spent a whole ten minutes in the sky all by myself. Wow, how lucky am I?

The answer, in case you were in any doubt, is very.

I’ve been here at Cardiff for less than a week, five of us arrived last Sunday evening for a four week stay during which Her Majesty the Queen would pay for our board, lodgings, groundschool and thirty hours of flying. I mean, not personally, she’s not popping in with her cheque book, but the government are paying for us to be here. We are all seventeen years old, we all want to be pilots.

Our journey here started in February with a trip to the Officer and Aircrew Selection Centre at Royal Air Force Biggin Hill in Kent. As an air cadet I had applied for a Flying Scholarship and was heading to Biggin Hill to be tested to see if I might be made of the right stuff. Just the trip to Kent was amazing to me. As a young Northerner with a passion for all things air force and all things aviation, this was brilliant. I’d only ever heard of Kent in the books and films of the Battle of Britain, now I was on a train from St. Annes-on-Sea to Bromley South Railway Station where I can then get a bus to the famous Biggin on the bump.

On Weald of Kent I watched once more

Again I heard that grumbling roar

Of fighter planes; yet none were near

And all around the sky was clear

Borne on the wind a whisper came

‘Though men grow old, they stay the same’

And then I knew, unseen to eye

The ageless Few were sweeping by

Lord Balfour of Inchyre

The Royal Flying Corps started flying from here in 1917 to defend London against attack from German Zeppelins and Gotha bombers. Just after the end of the first war, Biggin Hill was the scene of a mutiny by airmen who were sick of freezing half to death in tents amid a sea of mud. One evening in early January 1919 a group of airmen met in their mess tent which was little more than a canvas hangar with holes in the roof and walls. The meal had, apparently, been at least as bad, if not worse, than the awful rations they’d been living on for many weeks. They sang the Red Flag and decided to mutiny. The next morning no-one reported for duty and the orderly officer discovered that the magnetos had been removed from every vehicle on camp. You should never, ever piss off people who know more than you do about anything important.

The striking men, many of whom had homes, wives, children and jobs to return to and were now just awaiting demob after the war’s end, complained to the Commanding Officer, Colonel Blanchy, about the unsanitary conditions in which they were living. Not only was the food bad and the accommodation poor, they had no baths and only one washbasin for every one hundred men. Colonel Blanchy did not send them away or tell them to take it up with Area HQ, as some commanding officers may have done, he actually accompanied them to Area HQ at Covent Garden (in vehicles with miraculously re-appearing magnetos) and supported their case. Everyone was sent on ten days leave, the camp was improved and most of their other demands regarding time-off, leave and use of facilities on camp were met. I do like a bit of mutiny, especially when the little man wins and nobody gets shot or thrown overboard or cast adrift in a lifeboat only to colonise Tristan de Cunha.

Biggin Hill is best known for being a fighter airfield during the Battle of Britain and there are still traces of that RAF station there today. There’s the brick built guardroom at the main gates and the accommodation blocks that we are in seem to date from this time, too. We had to do lots of tests to see if, one day, we might be pilots. Some were on computers, where a green dot tries to fly around the screen and you use a joystick and rudder pedals to try to keep it as close to the middle as possible. There’s another where swerving and curving lines of dots run down the screen and you have to steer a pointer to go over the dots; the pointer lags behind your movement by half a second or so. Every time you go over a dot you score a point; the more points you get, the more chance you have of passing. Sometimes the lines of dots split and you follow one line only to find out that it has fewer dots than the other but the time taken trying to change over, with the delay in the pointer movement, means that you might as well stick with the rubbish line you’ve picked. Then there were lots of maths type questions and IQ type tests with pencil and paper. There was an interview, too but I honestly can’t remember a lot about that. I must have done well enough though because on 19^th April I got a letter to say that I’d been chosen for a flying scholarship.

That means that I get thirty hours of flying training paid for and all of the ground exams for a Private Pilot’s Licence. I’ve never even driven a car yet and here I am, flying an aeroplane by myself. I’ve had eight flights so far with instructors showing me what the controls do and what to do in an emergency and how to fly a circuit round the airport and land back again. The training has been fantastic and it’s all we have to do, all day, every day. We get up, we have breakfast, we spend the morning either in groundschool or flying, we have lunch, we spend the afternoon either flying or back in groundschool and we have dinner. After dinner, unless there’s something on in the bar, we’ve got the place to ourselves. We can go out and sit in the aeroplanes and run through all of the checks, think through the emergencies they told us about and what to do if they happen. We also take photographs of each other and generally pose as though we’re Battle of Britain pilots in a movie.

All of the flying exercises that we have to go through are set out in the books that we have. My first flight was only thirty-five minutes long but we crammed in the first five exercises. To be fair, that’s only really the effects of the controls and which bits on the outside waggle about when you waggle things on the inside. I’ve spent more than half my life knowing that and I’ve done it before in Chipmunks and motor gliders, so it’s no surprise that we didn’t linger on that. We had to go through it, though: the throttle to control the engine, the rudder pedals to yaw the aircraft’s nose left or right and the yoke. The yoke is the main flying control: side to side to roll the aircraft wings, forwards and backwards to push the nose down or pull it up. There are other controls to think about, too: the carburettor heat, the flaps, the trim wheel, none of them entirely new to me, though. The next flight was fifty minutes long and covered straight and level flight: keeping the aeroplane at the height you want it and pointing in pretty much the direction you hoped for. We also covered what to do if there was a fire although shitting yourself and crying wasn’t included, so it wasn’t that realistic.

Then came climbing and descending, which are pretty important unless you want to taxy everywhere. They teach you an order to do things in but it’s fairly obvious. Power, attitude, trim to climb: that is, set the power you need, point the nose where you want it to be in relation to the horizon and then trim the aircraft out. You do that by turning a little wheel between the seats which moves a tab on the elevators on the tail which ensure that the aeroplane wants to carry on flying at the speed you choose. When you’ve pretty much reached the height you want to be at you push forward to bring the nose down, then reduce the power and then trim. It makes sense to do it all in that order. If you climbed by pulling the nose up first, you wouldn’t have enough speed to get up the imaginary hill. Likewise, reducing power before pushing the nose down would not be wise. So, it’s PAT to go up and APT once you get there. Going down is PAT again for equally obvious reasons.

Then it took an hour and ten minutes to learn how to turn the aircraft onto desired headings and to learn all about slow flight and stalling. The aeroplane stalls when the wing reaches an angle in relation to the oncoming air at which it can no longer create lift. At that point it stops flying and you kind of have to follow suit and stop flying, too. You simply have to change that angle and help it out by adding a bit of power as everything will be going quite slowly by that point. It’s not such a big deal, really. Sometimes one wing gives up on the whole flying business before the other and that can get a bit interesting although good old G-BGZE refused to do that which meant that the instructor had to try to convince it to drop a wing. Zulu Echo was far too much of a gentleman for that, though and looked after me marvellously.

That was followed by three trips over the next two days spent mainly flying round and round the airport, landing and taking off again. This is called circuits or, quite correctly in my case, circuits and bumps. Take off, fly to five hundred feet, turn ninety degrees until you reach one thousand feet, turn through ninety degrees again and fly parallel to the runway. This is the downwind leg of the circuit, here you tend to do the pre-landing checks. One of the guys on the course called John, who is the cool kid, there’s always one in any group and it is, of course, relative to the rest of us so does not really require an objectively high level of coolness, has come up with a mnemonic for these checks: HBUMFFHH, pronounced Huh Bumf Huh Huh. It’s not, perhaps, the greatest mnemonic but it tells me to give the engine a blast of hot air; check my brakes are off; check the undercarriage, though as it’s fixed and welded to the aeroplane there’s not much I can check, I say it anyway; I check that the fuel mixture is rich; that the fuel is switched on and is sufficient, though I’d know if it was switched off from the silence and it’s never really clear what I’d do if I checked and it wasn’t sufficient; my flaps are as I want them; I turn the hot air off and check that the hatches and my harness are secure; so it could be Huh Bumf Huh Huh Huh, really.

On one of the three trips we head off to do a bit more slow flight practise, as it’s a jolly good idea to slow the aeroplane down prior to meeting the earth but a jolly bad idea to slow it down too much. We also practise spinning the aeroplane, apparently it’s not really mandatory any more but we do it anyway. If you get the aeroplane too slow and are generally farting around with the controls to get it to fly around a circuit then it is not impossible to not only stall the aeroplane but to make it spin. Here, as it stops flying, it also flips over and starts to rotate, faster and faster towards the ground. Now it is doing just about everything an aeroplane can do all at one time: it is stalled, rolling, yawing, pitching, sideslipping and rapidly losing height. If this happens up high, you can close the throttle, push the rudder in the opposite direction to the way that you’re spinning and then ease the yoke forwards to unstall the wings. When the rotation stops you can centralise the rudder, level the wings and ease out of the ensuing dive before adding power to climb away. If this happens at circuit height, especially at the sort of height where you’re turning onto your final approach, where a spin is probably most likely, you may have time to close the throttle and push the rudder in… Ah, no height left, best not to get into that position in the first place, then.

This morning I flew in G-BGZE with my instructor, Mr Griffith. After an hour of flying circuits we taxied back to the flying club and he said: “How would you like to try one by yourself?”

“Yeah, okay.” Was about all I could manage.

He unstrapped, opened the door and stepped out. Here I was, all by myself in an aeroplane. So, I did what I’d been trained to do. I called the air traffic control tower and asked for permission to taxy and, once they’d given me the go ahead, I taxied to runway three-zero, pushed the throttle open and took off.

I was about three feet off the ground when I said to myself: “Right, you’ve got no choice, you’ve got to land again now.” I had noticed, perhaps a little late, that while all take-offs are voluntary, landings are mandatory.

The little aeroplane climbed much more quickly now there was just me on board. As I’d been taught, at five hundred feet I turned ninety degrees to the right, then ninety degrees right again to fly parallel to the runway; this is known as the downwind leg. As it’s always best to take off and land with the wind blowing on your nose, on the downwind leg the wind is up your backside, pushing you along faster, goading you to get your downwind checks done.

I’ve settled into the flight now and start to sing to myself. Not being the cool kid and, therefore, not having to think of anything suitably cool like, maybe, Flying High Again by Ozzy Osbourne or, well, I don’t know, I’m not the cool kid, I sang Gene Kelly’s Singing in the Rain and changed rain to plane. Out in the dark blue Bristol Channel ahead of me I can see the two small islands of Flat Holm and Steep Holm and, beyond them, Weston Super Mare birthplace of comedian John Cleese.

As I approach the outskirts of Barry, from where the owner of the flying school, Niall McGarry, had collected me in his pea green Mercedes less than a week ago, I turned right again, heading out over the water for a moment or two before turning right and lining up with the two and a half kilometres of runway.

The PA-38 I’m flying can take off and land five times in the length of the runway here at Cardiff Airport so getting it onto the ground and stopping before I reach the grass at the far end is not really that much of a challenge but it doesn’t feel that way right now. I tell the control tower that I am on final approach and try to relax. As I come in low over the Porthkerry road I see an old man in a cap, stood next to his bike which is leaning up against the perimeter fence of the airport. He’s watching the aeroplanes come and go.

“I bet you think that I know what I’m doing, don't you?” I call out to him but he’ll not hear.

Then I’m over the runway, pulling back the throttle, flying just a matter of inches above the ground, letting the aeroplane slow down and settle back to earth. The air traffic controller gives me taxy instructions and congratulates me on my landing. That’s the thing with flying, if you’re on the ground then you’re only ever as good as your last landing and, if you’re in the air, then you’re only as good as your next one.

John, the cool kid, goes solo a little later in the day and, over the next few days we hope that the other three guys on our course will follow.

Celebrating the Solo