Well, drat!
But a short while after returning from the trip to Ireland that had opened my eyes to how neat the world looked from a few thousand feet, Friend Patrick suggested that I go with him to the Shropshire Aero Club, that he had recently joined. What little I thought I knew of private aviation suggested that I would be mixing with rather rich people and flying the equivalent of a Rolls Royce automobile; that didn't sound like a lot of fun. He said it wasn't like that, so one sunny Saturday, off I went.
The Shropshire Aero Club still exists, and I'm pleased to notice that it appears from its web page to be thriving. I should, therefore, make it clear that these are my own memories from the mid 1970's, too many years ago, and have nothing to do with the club as it exists now. Not that I have anything to say about it that I would consider bad, but it just has nothing to do with what you might find there now.
Despite the impressive name, the Club was located in a delightfully rural place with the interesting name of Sleap. If there was anything but the airfield there, you could call it a village, but since there wasn't (isn't?) it couldn't even be called a hamlet. My unease about the atmosphere at the club was completely unwarranted, and I was made welcome. As I arrived I saw somebody manhandling an impressively large model aircraft on the grass. Looking at the parking lot didn't indicate that members were particularly rich, although I didn't consider the obvious fact that they might have been if they didn't spend so much money flying.
Friend Patrickshowed me around, and I found the facilities to have a pleasantly well-used feel to them. I was less enthusiastic when I found that the large model aircraft I had seen as we arrived was actually one of the three Cessna 150 2-seater aircraft owned by the club, and even less enthusiastic when Friend Patrick explained that the one he was showing me was an Aerobat version: "In an emergency, you just pull this handle and the doors come off so you can get out quickly". So... we would wear parachutes? "No". I was obviously missing something, but it seemed to me as if that would seriously compromise the value of being able to get out quickly in case of emergency.
The Club also had a Piper Cherokee four-seat aircraft, a battered Land Rover fire truck and a ride-on lawn mower used to keep the taxiways clear (very popular on pleasant summer days). The airfield itself would have been quite astonishing if I'd known what I was looking at -- it was a World War II bomber field, and had multiple long, wide and flat runways built for heavy bombers. Flying took place mostly on weekends, and the runways were used for automobile parts testing during the business week, brakes, tires, that kind of thing. It just looked like an airfield to me, though. The Club was located in the old control tower, with various storage, training and office spaces on the ground floor and a pleasant bar on the floor above. On the roof was a sort of wooden hut with large windows that was now used as the control tower.
The smell of a light aircraft is very distinctive, and a whiff of it brings back all sorts of memories that began that day as I first sat in the Cessna cockpit and looked around at something that was most definitely not luxurious but was strangely pleasant to me. First of all, there was the smell, a combination of AvGas, oil, long-forgotten packed meals and... Well, I don't know what it is, but if you've been there you remember. The controls were all well-used, worn smooth and comfortable, the instruments worn but clear and the seats not exactly comfortable, but you adapted to them eventually. There didn't seem to be quite as much Stuff as there had been in the Islander to Aran, but that made sense since there were only half the number of engines and one fifth the number of seats.
Eventually, I went and flew. My log book says it was a half hour of "Famil", and I remember surprisingly little of it except that it was wonderful! Up we went, and I was surprised to find that I was lost almost immediately. Normal, I was told. The instructor said "You have control", which was somewhat of an overstatement, but I gingerly found that the little Cessna did more or less what I wanted it to do. Left and right, up and down... Suddenly I realized that I had movement in three dimensions. I was flying!
The wind noise increased, the engine sounded faster and the instructor took control again. "That was a spiral dive", he said. Is that like a spin? "Not really". What's the difference, I asked? "Well, if you stay in a spin you crash, but in a spiral dive you rip the wings off and then you crash". Oh, well... I certainly wouldn't want to cause any unnecessary damage to the wings.
I hadn't expected to be able to be at the controls so much of the flight. The sudden discovery of (relative) freedom in three dimensions, the feel of the air on the control surfaces and the sheer beauty of this new perspective on the world were overwhelming -- yet somehow, it felt quite natural.
To nobody's great surprise, I joined the Shropshire Aero Club that day.
It was a long drive from home to Sleap, so I would usually spend the whole day, and often the evening, there. This gave me plenty of time for ground study, and apart from the flying stuff I needed a VHF radio license. I suspect that it wasn't quite as rigorous at other places but at Sleap the radio etiquette was By-The-Book, and the book could have been the same one that British Airways used. We were always expected to be very proper ("Sleap, Golf Alpha Yankee Oscar Victor, radio check on one two two daycimal fower fife"). Eventually, somebody realized that the Air Traffic Control provided by Sleap was not only an enormous responsibility, but was also illegal. So we went overnight from an imperious "India Tango cleared to the holding point zero one" to an advisory "At your discretion, India Tango. Be advised that you are lining up to take off with a 40mph tailwind into a thunderstorm on a runway that has been abandoned since 1944, through a wire fence and a herd of sheep, with a Boeing as conflicting traffic on short finals to your cross runway. I say again: At your discretion". Actually, that's a ridiculous example: We never had a Boeing visiting while I was there.
We didn't have all that many visitors of any sort, come to think of it. The weak state of private flying in England meant that all most people did was take off, fly around for a while, perhaps going to look at some favorite place (like the pilot's home), return, land and leave. Sad, really, but I was lucky enough to make a couple of short trips.
Of the few visitors that we had, I only remember three:
The first one we heard about when the telephone in the tower rang (most unusual). It was Royal Air Force Shawbury letting us know that we had "somewhat" non-radio traffic inbound. A couple of Birmingham dentists had got their transmit key stuck and had been broadcasting their conversation, along with some interesting gossip, since leaving the Birmingham TCA. They thought their radio was dead, and I was soon listening to the discussion that was preventing any other use of our frequency. It was frustrating, standing on the roof flashing a green light at them, and hearing them wonder whether it was for them "It can't be for us, they don't know we want to land there". "Guys!", I shouted, uselessly, "The whole county knows you want to land here, and we'll soon be getting calls offering help with your little medical problem!".
More worrying at the time was one of the regular visitors who called up to tell us that he was short of fuel and needed to land as soon as possible, but he wanted to do it on the grass because he thought there was something wrong with one of his main wheels. He made a low pass and everything looked as good as you could tell at the distance ("Yep, there's three of them under there") before I found myself sitting at the wheel of Rescue One, wondering how I'd got myself into this mess and accelerating hard as the little plane touched down alongside me. No problem, as it turned out.
And then there was the aerobatic champion who was putting on a display for a festival in the nearby town of Shrewsbury. We were the nearest airfield for him to rest between shows, and I happened to be in the tower (the one on top of the tower, that is) when he arrived. The first thing that I noticed was "Hey, that's a biplane, cool", shortly followed by "Just a moment, aren't the wheels supposed to be underneath" and (very) shortly after that by "HOLY %$#@!" as he passed, inverted, a (very) few feet above us. We went with him to the bar and talked over coffee. He was excellent company, interesting, arrogant, obnoxious and very, very good. The dramatic entrance, he said, was to make sure that he got our attention since he was non-radio. I seem to remember that Vic (the Chief Flying Instructor: aka God's personal representative in Sleap) spoke with him about the unconventional arrival, but it was clear that he didn't give a rat's rump what we thought. When it was time for him to leave I stood on the tower flashing a green signal lamp ("cleared to taxi to the runway") and he just floored it. I think he was airborne before he left the parking area. He put on a short display for us as he left.
He needn't have worried about radio, anyway. Non-radio was, if not the norm, at least well-understood at Sleap. Each aircraft had two NAV/COM radio sets, but it seemed as if those things took more maintenance than the rest of the aircraft put together and it was common for us to find them either not working or so temperamental that the most you knew was that somebody was transmitting something. Early on in my training I had the opportunity to go along on a trip of several hours to get one of the Cessnas to a specialist who thought he could fix them once and for all. (Ha!) This was the first longer flight that I'd made, and was flying right-seat on this one with my usual instructor flying. My job was nominally navigation and radio, but since the radio was happily burbling nonsense to itself and my instructor knew exactly where he was I just concentrated on learning to see things properly from the air.
Roads are almost useless in most places (too many of them, it's the same with lakes in Minnesota) although a big highway can be useful. Railroads are great, and in England you can always go down to see the name on the large platform sign (like water towers in the USA). Canals are good, if you know them -- which I did. Airfields, oddly enough, are often just confusing because they all look the same. There was a story at the club, probably untrue, of a flight of three RAF Hawks (a gorgeous jet trainer) inbound to RAF Shawbury that didn't realize they'd landed at Sleap until the Shawbury tower controller asked which runway they were on because he still couldn't see them.
But it was all really about the flying, and that really was something that I enjoyed. It was best of all when there were big, fluffy, white cumulus clouds making mountains and valleys and passes all around, and I could go up and play in those valleys. What a sight! It happened all too seldom, but that sort of perfect weather made all the work and expense worthwhile. The training itself was usually something that I enjoyed, too. Stalls and spins made me, umm... uncomfortable (fixed later by an aerobatic instructor in Spain) but it got tedious for a little while after I'd passed that big first step and flown on my own and spent hours (and hours, and hours...) practicing landing and takeoff.
It was during that period of circuit training that something other than routine first occurred: There were at least three of us in the circuit, doing touch-and-go landings, and with other arriving and departing traffic things got a little busy. Busy enough that at one point I asked another of the students to confirm his position in the circuit, because I really didn't want us to be too close together. All was actually going rather well until I made my final full-stop landing, somewhat long, and turned round to exit the runway at the nearest taxiway, only to find that instead of a clear, empty stretch of blacktop (with, perhaps, another aircraft on long finals) I was looking at the front of another Cessna 150 just touching down not too far away. It wasn't really dangerous because the runways at Sleap are so wide, but this was most definitely not By The Book. I dived off into the grass and watched the other aircraft zip past smartly. What really annoyed me was my instructor's attitude, as he met me on the ramp, that somebody landing on top of me was no big deal, but I had done A Bad Thing by using the radio to ask another aircraft to confirm location in the circuit ("You should have known where it was"). "Well, excuse me..." I thought, "Are we worried about U-Boats getting a radio fix on the field?" It didn't occur to me until much later that it had probably been a lot more exciting to watch than to take part in, and he probably wasn't thinking clearly himself.
Safety, of course, was a large part of the instruction. Before going solo I had done numerous engine-out exercises, where the instructor would close the throttle and the aim was to pick a landing spot and approach it until the instructor opened the throttle again. One day I was with an instructor other than the one I was accustomed to, an older man with a relaxed style. We were a few miles South of the field when he closed the throttle and said "the engine stopped, now what?". "OK, fine, we've done this before" I thought, going through the engine-failure checklist, and began looking for an inviting-looking field with no wires across the approach. There were a couple of options, and I set up for the one that looked easier. "That's a good choice", he said. "But let's pretend that there are power lines in front of it". No problem, we'd done this exercise before and I set up for the next one. He settled down and appeared to go to sleep. By the time you get down to a few hundred feet, engineless, your options are becoming limited. The exercise usually terminated at a minimum of a couple of hundred feet, by which time I was either set up nicely for the field or had demonstrated the need for more practice by making a complete dog's breakfast of the whole thing. At a hundred feet he was still motionless. At fifty feet he stirred, and indicated that things were going well.
Bump! Thump, rattle, bang. We jolted across the field and stopped. Surprisingly undramatic for an engine-out landing, but I was still surprised to be on the ground. "We'll try a short-field takeoff in a few minutes", he said, "But let's taxi over to the barn first".
We were rather close to the barn before I saw the aircraft inside it, with a person protruding from the engine bay. It turned out that my instructor was part owner of the aircraft in the barn. It lived on the field, which was known to his friends as West Felton International, on the grounds that it was near the Welsh border.
Speaking of safety...
We were not the only users of the airfield. I was never quite sure how closely we were associated with them, but there was a gliding club sharing the facilities. Unfortunately, they didn't do any teaching so I never flew a glider there (that was to come years later, in Spain) but I always enjoyed talking with them and it was sheer delight to watch their grace in flight. These glider pilots would often make cross-country flights, and it wasn't unusual for an inbound glider to hang around over the field while a student made a go-around and second landing. For launching, they used an ex-RAF Chipmunk trainer as a tug. One day I was taught how to hand-start it when the starter failed. Not too difficult, but the penalty for doing it wrong is severe. (Kids: Don't do this at home. You really, really don't want to be in the same place as a moving propeller. Think of it as a big, strong and fast food processor).
It always surprised me that the first thing somebody thought about when flying a light aircraft was often "You must be brave". "Quite the contrary", I would tell them -- even though I was still indestructible in those days. "There are old pilots and bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots&".
The only accident that I knew anything about (apart from the false alarm with our visitor's wheel) was when one of the gliders was caught short, so to speak, and instead of landing in a field it stalled into a wood just a little short of it. Despite extensive damage to the aircraft, the pilot walked away with just bruises.
We were always careful about weather, of course, and couldn't fly in poor visibility. Even if we wanted to (we didn't) and had it been legal (it wasn't) the only radio NAV aid at Sleap was an unreliable NDB (Non Directional Beacon). I spent far too many a day at Sleap waiting for the promised break in the weather, and you could often find a little group of people looking out of the window ("It's clearing, look, you can see a bit of the fence"). I remember one day, looking out of the window as some small bird, a sparrow or something similar, flapped madly to try and make headway against the driving rain and wind with little success. If even that bird couldn't do much then I might as well go home. The unshakeable optimist beside me said "No, it's a hawk. It's hovering looking for prey". What sort of prey was it going to find in that quagmire, goldfish?
And then, suddenly and with no real planning, I moved away and was living in Holland.
If flying had seemed expensive in England, It was doubly so (literally) in Holland. And if the weather was sometimes bad at Sleap, you should have seen it after it had spent a day or two over the North Sea. I tried, once, but it just wasn't going to happen. So that was an interest put on hold for a couple of years, until I left Holland and spent a summer doing nothing in particular in England.
A brief flirtation with hang gliding (which was fun, but at my level seemed to involve frequent landings in gorse bushes) left me looking at aircraft with seats again, and the friend who had introduced me to Shropshire Aero Club suggested a short trip while I was waiting to see where I would go next. As is the way of such things, the trip slowly shortened, until he had only a couple of days available.
The aircraft that he proposed using was a rather nice, and nearly new, Grumman Tiger. I was pleased with the selection, which I thought was much nicer than the ubiquitous Cessna/Piper, with a pleasant, well laid out cabin, a slippery agile shape and a roll-back canopy that I far prefer to doors, even in the English climate. It even had functoning radios.
With only a short time available we made the most of it, leaving from just North of London shortly after first light, and heading vaguely South. In this context, "South" actually means "South East" since everybody crosses the channel by the short route, so we arrived, in a bright blue sky and perfect weather. at... I've forgotten where we stopped to clear customs, but it doesn't really matter. Despite the perfect weather locally, there was a storm making the area that we had so carefully planned for untenable for the next day or so. (Despite the cheerful, optimistic and probably old, forecast that we'd received not long before at departure.)
We quickly changed plans and changed direction for where the weather was more appropriate. So after leaving my home there all those many years ago I saw Beachy Head and its lighthouse again. The last time that I'd been there I had been no more than three years old, holding my father's hand tightly and peering over the cliff, where far below I could see the lighthouse and a ship that had been wrecked on the rocks. This time I was seeing it from a vantage point that I would never have dreamed of in those far-off days.
In good weather, the South coast of England is surprisingly interesting, and we spent a while looking around until deciding to head in to Sandown on the Isle of Wight. Approaching the island from the West, the line of isolated rocks called The Needles stand out clearly, with the lighthouse at the end of the chain completely isolated, yet so close to suburbia on the island. This Island is not wild or untamed in any way, and I was actually rather surprised to find Sandown airfield was rural with grass runways. Not only that, but they had no objections to our pitching tents next to the aircraft.
Much to everybody's surprise, the next day offered equally perfect weather, and after breakfasting at the terminal (yum!) we headed off for another day of sightseeing. (Although the catering at small airfields is usually better than at large ones I can honestly say that aero-food is one of the things that you learn to tolerate, rather than look forward to, like doors that pour rainwater on your lap and getting mud on your knees while pre-flighting low-wing aircraft.) I was looking forward to a flight across the Bristol Channel and up the Welsh coast when we stopped to fill up with new coffee (and empty the old) at Exeter and Friend Patrick (seen in the nearby picture) noticed that he'd left the briefcase containing his entire identity and life (along with all the charts) in the met-office at Sandown.
Well, that was okay. The South Coast looks very different when you're heading the other way. And, although I didn't know it then, I was about to return to flying. The controllers at Heathrow were feeling generous, so we were able to overfly London on the way back for a spectacular view of the capital in the setting sun.