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       Out of Africa

      Pointing at the joystick, Miles, my instructor (known as ‘Air’ Miles), said: ‘That’s the houses lever. Push it forward and the houses get bigger; pull it back and they get smaller.’

      Letter to The Times, week ending 14th March 1998

      ‘Done any flying before?’

      ‘A few hours in a little plane—a Cessna.’

      ‘Heh-heh-heh. No, then.’

      ‘You think this is better?’

      ‘This is flying.’

      ‘What’s wrong with Cessnas?’

      ‘What’s wrong with Ford Sierras?’

      I looked round the breezy cockpit, where we were wedged tightly alongside each other, Geoff in the right-hand seat, I in the left. There was a singular lack of dials or instrumentation compared to the cockpit of any other plane I had ever seen; just four gauges, in fact. I realised that I could identify all of them: compass, altimeter, airspeed indicator and engine rev counter. Between (and slightly in front of) us was a stick.

      Our seating position must have been no more than six or eight inches off the ground. We were protected from the drizzle by the wing above and an enclosing fibreglass pod; our forward view was framed through a curved, scratched, murky cowling and windshield. At our sides, where the doors would have been—had there been doors—was nothing. Above and in front of us was a tiny engine, about the size of two shoe boxes placed on top of each other. The intercom in my helmet crackled.

      ‘Keep clear of this…’ Geoff wagged the stick from side to side to indicate its range of travel.

      ‘And the throttle.’ He indicated a lever down on my left which moved in tandem with a lever his side.

      ‘…and the rudders.’ He paddled two stirrups at my feet, which I hadn’t noticed. The engine screamed, we flicked round in a sharp U-turn and were off. As we surged across the grass, with surprising momentum, I gripped the stout tube of the A-frame on my side of the cockpit. I felt disconcertingly low: so low that I could almost, had I not been pinned into my seat by the safety harness, have run my fingers through the wet tussocks. Yet strangely, though I was ready to be nervous, I wasn’t. I didn’t even notice when we left the ground. Suddenly the ride seemed to have become smoother, the grass was falling away and we were climbing over the hedge and a clump of scrubby trees in the corner of the field.

      The view was extraordinary. The open sides and huge windscreen meant unimpeded visibility to the front and sides. As we rose towards the low cloud, the ground began to become obscured by murky grey-white wisps of water vapour. Relief that I was still not feeling sick, or paralysed by vertigo, gave me a burst of confidence.

      ‘So why is this so much better? What can she do?’

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