flying over the hills
Sat, Jan 17, 2009
Last Christmas, Dawn got me a voucher for a flight with Highland Flying School and I’ve only just got round to using it. Luckily, they were very kind and extended it to the end of January, so I booked for yesterday, which turned out to be a small window between gale force winds! In a little two seater, with an instructor, we taxied onto Inverness airport runway:
“OK, our takeoff speed is 60kt” bumpity bump along the tarmac, “that’s us at 60kt, if you pull out on the bars…”, “eh? me?”, “yes,, just pull out and take off”.
So I took off from Inverness airport! The instructor then took over and climbed to 3000ft but told me to keep hold of the dual controls. Whatever he did, my controls did the same, so I could get a feel for what to do in the conditions, which were a 50kt wind from the SW and large banks of scudding cloud, not to mention some turbulence around 1000ft. Turbulence in a two seater is out of this world, especially when you’re flying the plane! I had a wee bit of turbulence once I took over again but after a minute or so of blind panic, you settle into it and well, you seem to become part of the elements.
Suddenly, it’s a new world. Totally new and three dimensional. As the plane lurches to the left, the nose might go down, so you have to think in 3D, not to mention scanning the ground to see how far you’ve been blown off course by the 50kt wind (more or less 50mph) and keeping an eye on the sky above you for other aircraft. A burst of unintelligible conversation came over the “cans” and the instructor said, “Jet coming in, SAAB, just in front of us, Glasgow flight”. It was the incoming Glasgow plane! It was a dark spot in front of the clouds which passed over us and headed to the airport.
We were at 3000ft heading toward the Monadhliath at 80kts but into a 50kt headwind so we were really only traveling at 30kts and we only managed to get just NE of Tomatin before turning back (it was a half hour flight). The horizon was cloud bound but I could see the A9 snaking away into the distance with the bustle of Inverness far below.
However, it was the feeling of complete and total freedom which was remarkable. The airspace up here is unregulated and you can more or less go where you like. There are RAF jets around but they have specific areas and heights. In the briefing room I was asked where I fancied going. I said the Cairngorms but we didn’t have enough time for that, so plonked my finger down on the Monadhliath. The plane has a range of 5 hours, which is just south of Newcastle, which means you could fly to France in a day. What a fantastic thing to do!
Up aloft, lenticulars were streaming off the lee slopes of the hills and we were in fairly calm air, with just the odd adjustment on the bars to keep the plane level and I was getting used to flying! But I had an instructor next to me, which helped!
As you plod through life, the chances of having a completely new experience diminish with time and to be a complete novice, frightened and yet controlling those fears to conquer them and build confidence and sit there grinning like a Cheshire cat, well, those sorts of things are harder to find the older you get. Why had I never tried this before I thought? The second I took the controls and felt the push and pull of the elements, I immediately thought of WWII Spitfire pilots. No idea why. It suddenly became clear how damn brave those chaps really were. I’m sitting there happily keeping a wee two seater on the level and feeling the wind play with us. Those men flew far faster, experienced blackout inducing turns and all the while fighting for their lives. Often, I look at old photographs of highland roads when they were dirt tracks and think “it must have been great to travel in those days, a real adventure”. Those roads are gone now, forever and we can only imagine the experiences of the early motorised travelers. However, when I took the controls of the wee plane, I suddenly realised the “road” was still there. This was the same air, the same clouds, the same wind that the Spitfire pilots had flown in. Their road was still there and I was traveling it. It made clear the contrast of constant change in our essentially 2D world, while up here, in the raw elements, influenced by mountains which have been the same for millennia, nothing really changes. I had left the mundane world of the commuter and risen back in time. I felt like a child with a new toy. The two of us were constantly looking here, there and everywhere, adjusting controls, talking about clouds and wind, like two grown men who’d suddenly become children again. It also showed me that powered flight is one of the best exercises that’s ever been devised to keep the human brain occupied. The engineering skills required to design and build a craft that essentially uses the viscosity of air to travel above the surface of the planet and the grey cell capacity required to interact with an alien, three dimensional environment.
It’s one of the best experiences I’ve ever had.
