Propellerhead. Antony Woodward

      Despite the disappointment of the holiday, the sun seemed to have come back out on life. Advertising was booming. Creative departments, which had an evocative (pre-digital) aroma of Magic Markers, Spraymount and ArtClean were exciting places to work. My days alternated pleasantly between flirting with three minxy secretaries, sitting in our Chinatown office with my feet on the desk trying to shoe-horn celebrities I wished to meet into scripts, and trying to swing location shoots. I spent happy periods pottering in Soho and got out of the office on periodic factory visits or to one of the sound studios, editing suites or post-production facilities sprinkled through the basements of Soho. When times were quiet, I went to matinée cinema performances in Leicester Square. Voice-over recordings gave me the chance to patronise famous actors like John Hurt and Ian Holm (‘Bit more emphasis on the ‘U’ please, John. Equip-U-Office Equipment. That’s it, John, you’ve got it’).

      We now automatically headed for Norfolk every weekend unless there was an overpowering reason not to. For some reason, the image from Out of Africa where Meryl Streep reaches back for Robert Redford’s hand in the flying scene above the clouds had lodged in my head. Already, I had visions of the Thruster carrying myself and a young model or actress that I might shortly meet on a shoot or at a casting session, plus a bottle or two of champagne and, perhaps, a few blinis, to a quiet area of Holkham beach. A slightly different version found us amongst the cow parsley of a shaded but sun-dappled corner of some unknowing farmer’s field, wrestling for the last morsel of a ripe peach as the juice ran down our chins. All that lay between me and these promising daydreams was the minimum twenty-five hours of flying time (with instructor or supervised solo), my General Flight Test, and a few straightforward multiple-choice ground exams. I imagine some similar idea was in Richard’s head.

      Accordingly, we fell into a more-or-less standard routine. On Friday night we would drive up to Salsingham, ready for me to take a lesson with Sean the next morning. In the afternoon I would switch to the passenger seat, and Richard, now fully legal, and I would head off together on a cross-country flight. On Sunday the process would be repeated, after which, tired but fulfilled, we would head back to London. This was the idea anyway. But the weather did not return to the clement skies of our summer holiday, and with Sean a lot busier at weekends it was hard to determine how instructive these weekends were. With less time to become immersed in the flying, I often arrived for my lesson still distracted by the week’s unsolved advertising problems and unmet deadlines. The period between putting away the Thruster on Sunday evening, and getting back into the cockpit (if all went well) the following Saturday morning, seemed like a lifetime.

      By the end of August I could take off and fly straight and level pretty competently (as, Richard pointed out, anyone could). I could feel if the nose was too high or too low. I could do gentle and medium turns, both climbing and descending. And I could do full-power steep turns sufficiently accurately that the ball of the slip indicator remained roughly central in its window, and I felt the blast of air of my own wake as I completed the turn (Sean’s more rough and ready definition of a perfect turn). Descending, I didn’t need to check the air speed indicator to know when I was going between 50-55 knots: I could feel by the back pressure on the stick.

      However, when it came to landing, everything went to pieces.

      I just could not get it right. Some people, I suppose, simply have a better sense of space and distance than others. I found the whole exercise of gauging an even, controlled descent from an altitude of around 1,000 feet down to a few feet off the ground at a specified spot in the landscape, by co-ordinated adjustment of throttle, ailerons, elevators and rudder, virtually impossible. Even if I did manage it, once I was down to near ground level, getting the Thruster smoothly onto the turf was another matter altogether. All might be well down to fifteen or ten feet from the ground. Sean would say something encouraging like ‘Nice. Very nice. That’s a perfect approach. This is going to be good, I can feel it.’ Then, when we were a foot or two from the ground, it would all go wrong. I would flare out (the action of rounding from a descending attitude to a level one just above the surface of the runway) too early, stall too high above the ground, crash down and bounce. I would flare out too late, slam into the ground, and bounce. Even if I flared out just right, and got the wheels onto the ground, she just would not stay there. With a mind of her own she would leap into the air again in a series of terrific balloons and kangaroo-like bounces. Each time Sean would have to take over and bring her back under control. Lesson after lesson went by doing nothing but landings, landings and landings.

      At one stage I thought I had it, and so did Sean. ‘One more like that,’ he would say, ‘and you can go solo.’ Then I would mess up the next one. It became a familiar routine. Each lesson he would say, ‘Right. We’ll get you solo this time Ants,’ and the end of the lesson would come and the matter wouldn’t be mentioned again. At other times he would say, doubtfully, ‘I don’t know, Ants, maybe I should send you solo. It might be the best way.’

      It began to depress me. My knowledge—buttressed by Sean’s repeated assurances—that the Thruster was, even by tail-dragger standards, an exceptionally difficult plane to land, had made it an exciting challenge to start with. But any reassurance that had conferred had long since begun to ring hollow. The others, including Dan, had all gone solo ages ago.

      I constructed reasons and explanations for myself. Richard had already done his licence. So had Mr Watson. Dan, living in Norfolk, had access to the plane in good weather on a regular basis, while I had to take my chances at weekends: in any one hour lesson I got, at the most (by the time I had completed each circuit), only eight attempts at landing. But the fact remained that I had now done eleven hours of flying—twenty-five if you included my hours in Africa—and I still hadn’t gone solo. It had become an issue. In every account of learning to fly that I had read, the subject had gone solo in a quarter of the time. Roald Dahl in Going Solo had done it in seven hours forty minutes. Cecil Lewis in Sagittarius Rising had soloed his Maurice Farman Longhorn after an hour and twenty minutes. An hour and twenty minutes. I even recalled that James Herriot had learnt to fly and when I looked up Vet in a Spin I discovered he had done it in nine hours. In the Battle of Britain seventeen-year-olds—seventeen-year-olds—were flying Spitfires—Spitfires—after the time I had been flying. I began to feel resentful and bitter. Why did the plane have to be stuck in Norfolk? Why was I saddled with such a lousy instructor? Why was I pouring money into this pointless activity?

      I had almost accepted that landing aeroplanes was one of those talents, like rolling hose-pipes or folding maps, that either you had or hadn’t when, one showery Saturday morning on the last day of August, I did three passable landings in succession—and Sean told me to take her up alone. ‘Remember, with only one, she’ll climb much faster,’ he said. I felt far from confident.

      Sean was right. Without a passenger aboard I seemed to be in the air almost before the throttle was fully open. She leapt off the ground, and once airborne seemed much lighter too, bouncing around a lot more. I was at 800 feet, the height at which I normally executed a gentle climbing turn into the crosswind leg, before I was two thirds of the way down the runway. It felt hideously lonely looking to my right and seeing, where Sean should have been, just an empty seat, with the safety harness buckled across it. By the time I reached the point where I normally turned crosswind I was already at 1,200 feet and realised that I should be levelling off. I reduced the power to the usual 5,700 rpm, but the Thruster continued to climb furiously—1,250, 1,300, 1,400 feet. I had to reduce the power to 5,000 rpm before the altimeter needle finally held steady. As I repeated Sean’s rule to myself (‘Attitude, Power, Trim’), for the first time I remembered the trimmer; I had forgotten to set it at all. Already it was time to turn onto the downwind leg. And—what was I thinking of?—I was almost halfway round the circuit and I hadn’t