Guernsey's not in Spain. Not even close. I know that, but chronologically and logically it was part of my Spanish flying because it was just a two week vacation in the middle of the Spanish part of my life.
There was (is?) a company, world famous in England, specializing in teaching instrument flying, located on the Channel Island of Guernsey. The British version of the Channel Islands are a group about thirty miles from the French coast, and oh... maybe 150 from the English South coast. As is often the way with such detached places, they are much more British than Britain is. Oddly enough, the weather there seemed to be much more British than French.
With the strange idea that learning to do something both useless (to me) and difficult is a sure-fire ticket to a perfect vacation (and if that's not enough, spend the whole time at an airport), I booked myself into the place for a two week instrument flying class.
It turned out that the way to get to Guernsey from Madrid was to fly to London and then take a commuter flight onward. Strangely, there was no convenient transportation from France. The flight from London was in pleasant, sunny weather (the last I would see until I left) with the sun glinting cheerfully off the acres of greenhouses that cover a large portion of the island.
Greenhouses?
Guernsey is a major supplier of tomatoes for Britain. In fact, it's their second biggest cash crop after offshore bankers. The greenhouses are required for tomatoes in the Guernsey climate. The most suitable (i.e. cheapest & easiest) place to stay was a small boarding house run by the wife of one of the instructors and the diet there was heavily tomato-based -- fried, baked, sliced, sautéed, raw, pulverized, boiled roast, shredded, liquefied and a few more. I don't remember a meal there that didn't involve the things.
Being quite small, the main islands of Jersey and Guernsey have become very suburban. Guernsey, with 24 square miles, is the smaller. And they have a somewhat curious legal status: They are/are not part of the UK and are/are not independent, depending on what the subject is. One of the smaller islands (Sark) is the last feudal state in Europe. It's ruler, the lord of the manor, is called the Seigneur. The Seigneur of the time (and I have no knowledge of any change) was a smart person, and he did not allow motor vehicles on the island, except for the farm tractor that pulls the ambulance and fire truck. Sark is like a smaller, rockier version of Mackinac Island MI, but more isolated and run by amateurs. I like Sark, although I only spent one day there. I took a boat across on a day when the weather was too lousy for flying and went on a horse-drawn tourist ride with the driver pointing out the sights. Things like "If the weather was better you could see Guernsey from here" and "You can't really tell in this mist, but this is the highest point on the island". The high point of the visit was scones with jam and clotted cream in the Village Institute, which I think was a Quonset (Nissen) hut painted pale yellow. Did I mention that I liked Sark? The airspace over Sark is Prohibited, and every time somebody strayed overhead The Seigneur called Guernsey ATC to complain.
That was the only side trip that I took. They said that Jersey was just a bigger, and less scenic, version of Guernsey and there was no easy way of getting to the third largest island of Alderney. Just as well, really, because Alderney is a sad, bleak island filled with ghosts. In 1940 the Germans arrived in the Channel Islands, and although they behaved relatively well for the cameras in populated Jersey and Guernsey, they used a legion of slaves to turn Alderney into a, mostly subterranean, fortress. Getting to the island is difficult with a fixed-wing aircraft and the waters around the islands are some of the most dangerous in the English Channel with strong tidal currents and weather that is only predictable in its general lousiness. I was amazed to find that one of the instructors at my destination had sailed the twenty miles to Alderney on a windsurfer. This remarkable man was said to be in his sixties, yet was amazingly active and had the body of a man in his twenties ("he keeps it in his freezer - ha ha!" said one of the other guys).
Each day I rushed through breakfast (fried tomato, how unexpected!), fired up the little Honda 50cc motorcycle that I'd rented and off to the airport. When you work with this company it's a full time affair, you are assigned one instructor to work with and you are his only pupil. I drew a large ebullient Russian who spoke with a heavy accent (Wolverhampton) and smoked heavily.
Once you've got used to the idea of spending your vacation at an airport, then Guernsey is a pretty good one to do it at. It's a friendly sort of place and I was introduced round the ATC center people, who I talked with a lot over the next two weeks. Watching them working for a while gave me a sense of what would be going on at their end. The burgers in the restaurant were... well, they were good enough. Most of the aircraft were twin turboprop flights from England and Jersey, with a few small twin-jet airliners. Nothing huge.
I was already familiar with the Cherokees that I would be flying, so the big change was that for the next two weeks I'd be flying without (for the most part) looking outside. In fact, the translucent screens around the left seat mean that the instructor did most of the landings and takeoffs. Actually, to convince me of the accuracy of the aids, he had me do a couple of zero-visibility takeoffs, and even a zero-visibility landing right down to the ground.
I can honestly say that I have never, ever come close to the learning effort that I used for that two weeks. Apart from one day going to Sark I spent every available minute either at the airport or studying at the guest house. At the airport no time was wasted, I was either flying, or being instructed in theory or using the little procedural trainer (a sort of baby simulator attached to a chart table). This procedural trainer was particularly useful, not only for trying things out without burning money in the air, but also because you got to use the other half of your brain that gets left on the ground (any pilot will tell you that you only get to use about half your brain in the air). As a fairly busy airport, the other traffic and ATC is good training and the regulars are used to the three or four students that are pretty much a permanent fixture. But make no mistake, this instrument flying is hard. At the risk of annoying the holders of an American Instrument Rating (IR) the British IMC rating that I was training for may be just a little harder, even though it isn't an official instrument rating. Just to make things a little more interesting, when they pointed out that adding a night rating was a fairly simple thing, given what I was already doing, I decided to do that as well.
Another thing to get used to was that this is an island. A small one. We always had lifejackets with us, and the presence of the water is a significant factor in case of engine failure. A pilot is trained to remember that if the engine fails on takeoff, you never go back. Turning back to the field with no power, no speed and no altitude is a strong indication that you are about to dig a hole in the ground. Here I was taught the addendum: "never go back, unless there are no better options". Here in Guernsey, the straight-ahead option involves the English Channel. Not only is it cold, but ditching a light aircraft with fixed gear is an iffy proposition at best. They trip over the wheels, you see, and flip over. Without dwelling on the likely results of being upside down in the dark, with the windshield freshly punched in by a ton or two of seawater and the airframe rapidly filling, it does seem as if going back might be a more attractive option than usual.
These thoughts came back to me later in my stay when I picked up an aircraft that had just finished a check (I think it was a 300Hrs check) and the engineers had cheerfully told me that it was A1 fine, just perfect, and I didn't need to do the usual preflight check. A few minutes later I went back and asked them whether the oily rag stuffed between the two starboard cylinders was needed for something else, or was it just there to hold the screwdriver in place. Oops! Possible scenario number one: All is well until the engine cooling fins get really hot and ignite the oily rag -- this would happen at about 300ft above the runway and the resulting smoke and fire would be the subject of much speculation in the cockpit. Possible scenario number two: The oily rag holds the screwdriver in place for a while until it escapes and happily dances around the engine compartment looking for something to break.
This was a good way to introduce an important rule... When the aircraft comes back from maintenance is a good time to do a really thorough check on it. Next time, I'll keep the screwdriver.
The flying was hard work, but satisfying, "fun" would be the wrong word. The workload and procedures are pretty much identical with those done by large jets ( as I was able to confirm later), if anything single crew in a light aircraft is slightly harder if you're dumb enough to get into tough conditions. For a little light relief, I tried out a new aircraft type: The Socata Tampico. This French-built aircraft type had only been available for two or three years at the time, and was an interesting update on the older French models. I'm sure that they've got better, but at that time it felt as if the French had decided to build their own version of an American light aircraft, and had lost sight of what made their own so good. It looked wonderful, and flew somewhat better than the PA-28 that was its competition, but it was nowhere near as nice as a Robin for me.
The first part of the flight was in daylight, and was as weird as any conditions that I've flown in. Although it was legally Visual Flight Conditions the sky and the sea merged together to give a strange orange-lit gray goldfish bowl effect. No horizon. The sun slanted across the cockpit and somehow created a very strong illusion that I was banked and turning hard to port. The instruments said otherwise. This kind of thing can be extremely dangerous for a pilot with no instrument training, because if you rely on your senses, you will very quickly be in a high-speed spiral dive, and with no recognizable horizon it would be easy to drill straight into the water. It's happened too many times, and I have no difficulty believing that this is what killed JFK Jr. Here's the thing... Despite all the safety checks and certifications and uniforms and oxygen masks ready to descend in case of sudden loss of cabin pressure, flying remains a balancing act. A good pilot (which I don't claim to be) has had enough practice that (s)he can spare a lot of brain power for solving problems. A beginning pilot has just enough brain power to keep straight and level in good conditions, using all available senses. As you get better, you can fly on instruments, when your other senses are actually trying to kill you.
Night fell as we neared the English coast, and the lights on the ground were the first I saw of land. The flight was very satisfying, and night flight felt strangely familiar. But something strange was happening... There were unexpected lights. At first I thought they were stars, but they didn't seem right -- they looked as if they were on the ground. Strange, reddish, low intensity flickering lights. As the flight went on, they spread, until they were all over the landscape. Then, the penny dropped! It was Tuesday July 28th, 1981. The next day, Lady Diana Spencer would marry Charles, Prince of Wales in Westminster Abbey. The lights that were spread as far as the eye could see were bonfires of celebration that had been lit all over Britain.
It was late by the time we arrived in Birmingham and there was a feeling of unreality at being in my family's home ("Did I really just fly up here from the CI?").
Next morning, bright and early, I was ready to leave. Bag in hand, on my way out of the door, I noticed the TV showing an interesting commentary on the events planned for the day. I sat down, bag still in hand. It was quite a while before I put the bag down, and my log shows that it was mid-afternoon before I got back to the aircraft. The log also shows a mystery stop on the way back. Perhaps the Customs & Immigration at Elstree had gone home, because I see a backtrack to Luton, where I remember a visit to the air-side duty free warehouse, with prices about half those in the terminal-side duty-free shop.
I made it back to Guernsey just as night was falling, totally beat -- and so I managed to miss all the celebratory fireworks. Why not leave after the fireworks were over at home? To be truthful, single engine flight at night didn't strike me as all that sensible (even though I wanted the rating), and single engine flight at night over water seemed a Really Bad Idea even though modern aero engines don't fail. Not all that often, anyway.
The last day of my stay on the island was set aside for tests and paperwork. The hardest part of the test was the two different instrument let-downs and Igor (really!) my instructor had decided that we would show how well he'd taught me by doing NDB and VOR versions. Hint: The easy two are the ILS and radar approches. It all went well -- although there is a huge difference in difficulty between a device that tells you where you are (the VOR) and one that tells you where it is (the NDB) and by the end of the day I had brand-new IMC and night ratings, as well as a healthy respect for the people who do it for a living. I'll say it again, this stuff ain't easy!
Strangely enough, the hard part came next day when I visited the CAA (equivalent of the American FAA) headquarters in London the next day to get an English pilot's license to put the new ratings on. I failed the medical! I already had an English pilot's medical, but it had expired, and the long time the doctor had spent on my color vision hadn't seemed significant (I have a slight white/green defect with very small lights at low intensity). I ended up spending the afternoon at the London Eye Hospital before I was given the green light (or was it white?).
Anyway, it all worked out well. And that was the most expensive, most satisfying vacation I've ever had. And the hardest work.