After earning my Spanish PPL I found that there was almost no concept in Spain of flying for fun. Unless, of course, you were very rich and had your own aircraft. If I wanted to keep flying, the best option was to continue training, by starting on the requirements for a commercial pilot's license. At this point I thought about the arrangements for setting up the PPL, and it just didn't seem worth while. But they explained that the administrative details for this stage were different. Not much easier, but different.
First, the flying was at Cuatro Vientos (no more treks to Sanchidrian), and the flying was by appointment. By telephone? "No, of course not!" (Silly me) "In person at this desk" Instead of paying for the whole course up front the idea was that I would buy as much air or simulator time as I wanted, when I wanted it. This sounded much more conventional. Could I start today? "No, of course not!" (Silly me again) I didn't have "tickets" (pronounced tee-kets). It turned out that I had to buy tickets, in ten-minute units, at the main office ("we accept cash"). But...Wasn't this the main office? It turned out that the main office was on the fifth floor of an apartment building one block from the arguable center of Madrid (Callao -- a word that, ironically, means peace and quiet). Incidentally, the street was at that time called Jose Antonio, renamed after one of Franco's chief sidekicks in the coup that brought him to power. Given that this was roughly equivalent to changing the name of Unter den Linden in Berlin to Martin Bormann Strasse it's not altogether surprising that it has since rejoined the uncountable number of High Streets of the world (Gran Via).
Anyway... The main office, although small, was also home to a simple flight simulator. In those pre-Microsoft days such a device was the best (ie cheapest) way of practicing instrument and radio navigation procedures, so I also put some hours on that machine.
I was never serious about completing the CPL, so this was somewhat less psychologically demanding. But I still worked hard at it because I found great pleasure in doing things a little better each time. In some ways the biggest change was that instead off logging Pu/T (pilot under training) it became P1 (pilot in command). The log shows that I started instruments straight away and began revisiting the (very) basic aerobatic maneuvers of the PPL, but this time with emphasis.
To be honest, things were a bit of a shambles for a while, and worst of all the day when the Man From The Ministry of Aviation came to observe, although I'm not sure if it was me or the CPL instructor who was being observed. For only the second time, I aborted a takeoff when a voice from the back seat said "the port fuel filler cap is off". Well, sure enough, there it was, dangling in the breeze from its chain. Okay, it was my responsibility... But I'm certain sure that it was correctly fitted when I last touched it, and I have a feeling the TMFTMoA was the last person to be on that side (the only door on a PA-28 is on the starboard side). It was certainly clearly visible had I looked out of the window earlier, but I've never seen a checklist entry that says:
13.6 Check fuel filler caps after entry in case bureaucratic maniac looking for trouble has doofused with them
I got my own back a few minutes later by being more enthusiastic than usual with the Chandeles and Lazy 8 maneuvers. The Cherokee was a little Vomit Comet that afternoon.
But I must admit that kind of stuff wasn't exactly my strong point. For the PPL training, most instructors would tell you to stall, and be happy if you shoved the nose down and firewalled the throttle as soon as things got mushy. Spins would usually be exited at the earliest allowable point, perhaps half a revolution. This got fixed one day when The Management decided to have a weekend party at a little dirt strip outside Madrid that they called La Mancha, (but I'm not sure about the name because that's like calling a rural spot in Iowa "The Mid West"). Whatever the name really was, I drove out and found a bunch of people, a big barbecue, a few aircraft and a whole lot of fuel drums. It's lucky there was food because there was a lot of pumping involved in getting the fuel from the drums to the tanks. I had a strong feeling that it was prearranged when I was introduced to a young man called Aresti, who was going to give me some help with stalls and spins.
Up we went in a Tomahawk (which is rather less gentle in the stall than most trainers) and he asked me to show him a stall and a spin. After the usual tentative performance he predated Crocodile Dundee by quite a few years when he said "That's not a stall. This is a stall" and showed me the way he thought it should go... Instead of recovering by stuffing the nose down he kept the column right back and the nose stayed high with our forward speed around zero. The vertical speed indicator was pegged on the downward stop and the altimeter was unwinding briskly . "Look at my feet", he said, and I realized that this wasn't as easy as it looked; they were dancing crazily on the rudder pedals.
(If you're a pilot you can skip this paragraph). In a stall, it's a bad idea to try and keep a wing up with an aileron (the surfaces that control roll) because the wing has just about no lift, and if you mess with a dropping wing by trying to get more lift out of it, the stall becomes deeper, the wing drops and bingo! You're in a spin. So the only thing you can do is try the rudder. Although it's the best available option in stall conditions, the rudder isn't a great tool for keeping a wing up so you have to be careful not to let it get away. Hence the dance.
Back up we went, and he got me to try it that way. Hey, this is fun! The first 500ft went very nicely, and I'd just had time to be surprised how well it was going when it got away from me and WHAM! The ground, that had been roughly in the right place, in a sort of "down-there, back-there" sort of way was suddenly filling the windshield and rotating rapidly. If anything it was sort of "up-there, mostly". "Great!", said Aresti, "This a nicely developed spin, let's go round a few more times to let it stabilize". "Oh, good", I thought, "excellent idea", as I watched the approaching ground with mounting interest. But he was right. After doing that routine a few more times I found that stalls and spins were nothing to be worried about any more (given a reasonable amount of room underneath) which meant that other maneuvers taking me towards those conditions were suddenly much easier.
The log shows only 35 minutes for that flight, but it was probably the most concentrated 35 minutes of aviation I've ever flown. It was only afterwards that I mentioned the coincidence that my instructor shared a name with one of the most famous aerobatic pilots, and the inventor of the written notation used to describe the art. "No coincidence, that's his son".
That explained a lot.
They finally, and somewhat grudgingly, agreed to let me take an aircraft to "sleep out" as they put it, and I made a weekend trip to Cordoba. A flight of about two hours in each direction. I didn't know the South West of Spain particularly well, and I was surprised at the ruggedness and color of the landscape. The flying itself was without incident, and all that sticks in my mind is the difficulty of seeing the airport at Cordoba (I knew where it was, but couldn't see it until much later than usual) and the Cordoba controller's insistence on speaking to me in unintelligible English.
The city itself was simply wonderful. After finding the International Style hotel full, I found a room in an old hotel in the center of town. The building was probably only a few hundred years old, but it felt older and had worn well. The picture shows the center courtyard which is common in the parts of Spain that were heavily under Arabic influence. Based on a short visit, this is probably my favorite Spanish city outside Madrid.
Returning to Madrid the next day, I saw something that explained the prickly feeling in my throat in the summer: From a few miles out, it looked as if a giant brown water balloon had been dropped on top of the city. This giant brown blob was the pollution held in by the summer inversion and looked entirely unappetizing.
I continued flying from Cuatro Vientos right up until I left Spain, although my focus shifted towards gliding from Fuentemilanos.