Propellerhead - Antony Woodward

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the other half sporadically running a motley pair of tatty blue-and-white Cessnas. There were a couple of school instructors, recognisable by their white shirts with epaulettes and dark blue trousers, and there was Carter. I never did learn whether Carter was his Christian name or surname. He was fat, with a kind face, and had a fat son called Keith who looked absurdly like him and occasionally manned the radio. Sean paid them no respect. The occasional roar of one of their engines, usually merely to taxi a plane from one position to another, represented the principal excitement of the day. Apart from this the only sounds to break the stillness were the crunch and rumble of the hangar doors morning and evening, the hiss and static of the radio in the Portakabin on the occasions that it was switched on, and the scream of the microlighters’ two-strokes. When this faded, as it did soon after take-off, there was just the skylarks, the bells of the round-towered church on the north of the airfield and the occasional distant sound of hammering.

      I had never taken a holiday like this. The combination of the weather, the rustic setting, a scheduled activity to give the day some (but not too much) structure, and enough country air and exertion (heaving ten-ton hangar doors, full jerry cans and the Thruster) to stoke ravenous appetites made it seem a world away from advertising, deadlines and the bars and traffic of Wardour Street.

      Salsingham, too, had a curiously soul-soothing quality; partly, no doubt, because the place was so extensive. Apart from the two wings (both larger than most large detached houses), there were stables and kennels, and workshops and barns, and the park with its overgrown lake and boathouse. There was a sleepy somnambulance about the place, as if, when the clock in the pediment on the west wing stopped (at three minutes to two), all influence from the outside world had ceased at the same moment. The flat, right at the top of the house, was spartan but ideal. There was a small kitchen in one of the corner towers, a couple of bedrooms and a sitting room with a view over the lake, behind which the sun set as the ducks came in.

      We saw little of the Watsons. Mrs Watson communicated with us mainly by note—irritated ones ticking us off (for bad parking or leaving doors open) alternating with invitations to supper. Occasionally we would encounter Mr Watson, in many ways a Caractacus Potts figure, driving his disintegrating orange Daihatsu, with its flapping rear doors, or carrying a spanner and a roll of electric cable. After helping to round up some escaped cattle, moving some heavy furniture, treating the obstinately opaque green waters of the pool, transferring a car battery and erecting an electric fence, we learnt to dive for cover at his approach. Life at Salsingham, it became clear, was one long, losing battle against an incoming tide of accumulating tasks. Mr Watson had a bumbling, absent-minded manner. He never showed the slightest recognition when he came across us and he never used our names, but as long as he regarded us as a source of assistance, rather than trespassers, I supposed it must be all right.

      Now that I was familiar with the basic controls, all lessons took the same form: circuits, circuits and more circuits. The circuit, the core element of instruction in all flying, is an imaginary, rectangular cube of air over an airfield, about 1,000 feet high, and a quarter of a mile or more in its other dimensions, the orientation of which varies daily, sometimes even hourly, to allow for taking off—as nearly as possible—into wind. The direction (left-hand or right-hand) tends to be dictated by local topography. At Barsham it depended on the activities, or not, of the glider club, and we always had to avoid the village, the RAF buildings, two houses to the north of the airfield containing litigious locals and, for safety’s sake, low approaches over the gravel pit on the north-east side in case of an untimely engine failure.

      Circuits allowed relentless practising of all the essential aspects of control of the aircraft: taxiing, take-off, climbing, levelling off, turning, cruising, following a heading, plotting the approach to land, descending and landing. If it sounds busy, it was: indeed, there seemed to be such an absurd amount to think about that I was always neglecting something. ‘Glance at the instruments,’ Sean would say. ‘Don’t gaze at them,’ as I became transfixed by, say, the needle of the altimeter, or the rev counter, or the air speed indicator, trying to get it to stay in exactly the right position. A helicopter pilot once told me that the kind of person who made a good flyer was someone who, while driving, could wash/wipe the windscreen, re-tune the radio and overtake simultaneously, without letting this in any way interrupt his conversation. I now saw what he meant. In simple ‘straight and level’ flight I had, simultaneously, to:

       Keep the nose level so I wasn’t losing or gaining height.

       Stick to within 4-5° of a given compass heading.

       Maintain a gentle but continuous pressure on the left rudder pedal to counter the torque of the propeller and the effect of the slipstream it put over the right wing on to the fin, so that the ball remained central in the slip indicator.

       Keep a roving eye on the engine temperature, rev counter, altimeter, and air speed gauges—not to mention regular checks of the fuel level.

       Look out, continuously, for birds and other aircraft, and—most importantly—a suitable field for landing in case of engine failure.

      This before I contemplated a manoeuvre. Fortunately, we did not have a radio, so I was spared having to keep the ‘tower’ informed of my actions in the dense and impenetrable jargon of radio-telephony.

      The result was that it was never until the end of each lesson that I seemed to get the hang of it, only to find that the hour had pinged by and time was up.

      Around the Tuesday a change came over Richard. It was just after he had taken his Air Law exam. Richard, like Lester, had a considerable head start on Dan and me. Having only recently acquired his Private Pilot’s Licence in Africa, the Civil Aviation Authority had declared that to be fully ‘legal’ he need only complete a cross-country flight in a Cessna to validate this licence, and then be ‘checked out’ in the Thruster. The one thing he had to do first, however, was sit and pass his UK Air Law exam, something I, too, had to do before I could go solo.

      Accordingly, we had both been desultorily cramming the air law statutes detailed in CAP 85: A Guide to Aviation Law, Flight Rules and Procedures for Applicants for the Private Pilot’s Licence. CAP 85 was not a racy read. In fact, in both its tone and content it reminded me unpleasantly of my short and lacklustre legal career. It was full of sentences like ‘Pilots flying beneath TCA or SRA should use the QNH of an aerodrome situated beneath that area when flying below transition altitude.’ However, if we were to get our licences, then learn CAP 85 we must. So, at spare moments, we had taken to quizzing each other on such essential questions for the single-engined, non-radio daylight pilot as:

       What sign does an aircraft marshaller make to indicate to you to open up your starboard engine?

       What Secondary Surveillance Radar code on mode ‘C’ should be used by an aircraft in the event of two-way radio failure?

       In level cruise, at the same altitude, at night, what does an anti-collision light together with a green and a white navigation light closing on you on a steady relative bearing of 330° indicate?

      Committing the statutes to memory temporarily levelled our relative flying experience, though inevitably Richard was well ahead. The rules of aviation in the UK were not dissimilar to those in Africa and by Monday evening he had felt ready to sit the paper in Sean’s office. Naturally, when I saw him afterwards, I asked how it had gone.

      ‘How did what go?’

      ‘You know—the exam. Air Law.’

      ‘Oh that? Messed up a couple of questions.’

      ‘Bad luck. Do you have to do it again?’

      ‘No. You only have to get 70 per cent to pass.’

      ‘You got more than 70 per cent? What did you get?’

      ‘98

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