Alongside Amy Johnsons bi-plane in the Science Museum is a plaque quoting something she once said: There is nothing more wonderful or thrilling than going up into the skies in a tiny plane at peace with everyone, and exactly free to do what you want and go where you will. Of all the purple prose generated by nearly a century of powered flight (mostly erring towards the Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth/And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings end of the literary spectrum), this probably best summarises the lure of flying for most single-engine pilots. But if this conventional idea is mainly about freedom and escape, is there any more to it than this? For me, there is and it is rooted in the cult of the amateur.
This is something that derives directly from the way that powered flight came into being in the first few years of the twentieth century. This extraordinary, staggeringly rapid period of discovery was driven by individuals, working from home, invariably in rural locations. Anyone who wanted to join the race had to invent and construct their own machine to do so. The would-be aviator was a self-sufficient Caractacus Potts figure striving to fulfil the oldest human dream. It was an extraordinary era, and the protagonists, enterprising, skilled and daring, were a minute handful. But even so, a powerfully romantic scene was set.
After the war, this romantic ideal of the individual conquering the sky became a possibility even for those who couldnt build their own machines, when in 1925 Geoffrey de Havilland introduced his Moth bi-plane. This was the first robust, reliable, two-seater, aerobatic trainer and lessons were available for 11 shillings a time.
The Moths wings folded back (hence Moth) so that it could be stored in a suburban garage, whence it could be towed behind a car to any open field, where the sky now opened to the ordinary (wealthy) man. Thus was initiated the so-called golden era of touring and amateur aviation. Compared to today, the skies were empty; there were no restrictions on air space or air traffic control. There were not even pylons to tangle with.
A decade later, when the Frenchman Henri Mignet published plans for his Flying Flea, the dream even seemed about to open to everyone. The Flea was a kit plane, which could be assembled for a song from plywood, tea chests, 4 x 2, and nails and screws in short, materials available from any local hardware shop. Anyone who can nail together a packing case, declared Mignet, can build an aeroplane.
The Flea was extraordinarily cute-looking, with its big wheels, big canvas wings, and rounded tail, especially when photographed in sunny, pastoral settings. Mignet described how he and his wife, Annette, would wheel the aircraft along roads and tracks to a suitable, large field where, while Annette sat under a tree sewing baby clothes, Henri would practise flying it. When they had had enough, the wings would be folded, the tools and Annettes sewing basket placed in the cockpit, and they would wheel the creation home again. It was an idyllic picture and, bolstered by evocative descriptions like this and by the fun he had flying it, Mignet won the heart of the world. When the English translation of his book The Flying Flea was published in Britain, 6,000 copies sold in a month and Flea mania set in.
The experience of freedom
To this day, for many flyers and I am certainly one this is the epitome of perfect flying: total freedom, without outside interference; self-sufficiency; pure fun; the prospect of adventure; beautiful countryside; and the wonder of the sky and clouds all in a light, economical small aeroplane that is easily transported.
After the Second World War, American companies such as Cessna and Piper, with their mass-produced, enclosed, metal planes did their best to kill off the amateur, accident-prone image of private flying with a new, sanitised, risk-free kind of flying in which the planes were as similar to modern cars as they could make them. But the advent of the microlight at the end of the 1970s (ironically a bi-product of the new materials and design discoveries of the Space Race) revived the dream again. Microlights, by their simplicity and low, slow, open-cockpit, wind-in-the-hair experience, offer the greatest freedom and, arguably, the purest form of powered flight, inasmuch as they offer greater feel of the air in the way that a tautly-suspensioned sports car gives greater feel for the road.
My own machine, called a Thruster, is a two-stroke-engined monoplane which does not resemble the conventional hang-glider-plus-engine that the word microlight usually conjures up. It looks like a cross between Alberto Santos-Dumonts 1909 Demoiselle (the machine flown by the Frenchman in Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines) and Mignets Flying Flea. Pilot and passenger sit side-by-side beneath a single wing, with the engine perched up above in front, giving sensational visibility. It has a maximum speed of 60 knots in still air, a range of about 2œ hours, it runs on unleaded petrol mixed with two-stroke oil, and can be bought for about £8,000 second-hand.
Microlights are slow, windblown, very much at the mercy of the weather and do not permit aerobatics such as loops and rolls. Because they rely on basic, seat-of-the-pants flying techniques without sophisticated flight instrumentation, and because they can land in ordinary farmers fields, on beaches and in other places that light aeroplanes cannot, they do genuinely offer an experience comparable to that of the early pioneers. Indeed, the unfolding excitements and achievements of learning to fly one of these machines closely parallel the achievements of the pioneers: first journey; first landing on tarmac; first international border crossing; first time in strong wind, in rain, above 5,000 feet, above clouds, and so on.
So if this is the appealing idea that drives my hobby, what are the other delights? One is the difficulty and the satisfaction, accordingly, that it confers. Learning to fly is difficult let nobody tell you otherwise says Wolfgang Langweische in Stick and Rudder, the first practical explanation of the art of flying, published in 1944, when flying and its rules and regulations were a great deal less complicated and technical than they are today.
A pilots licence carries with it a much greater sense of accomplishment than passing school or university exams. This is because it is such a wide-ranging test of physical and spiritual as much as mental competence. It requires a reasonable level of skill, coordination, spatial awareness, decisiveness, discipline, stamina, judgement, courage and coolness. In short, it is a general test of character. I had to get to know myself, grow up, confront my weaknesses and something that took me ages to realise take responsibility. For most pilots, the day they go solo is up there, as life experiences go, with being picked for the school football team, losing their virginity, first e, etc. (Even as I write, a Spitfire pilot being interviewed on Radio Fours Midweek has just said: You never forget your first solo. You look at the empty seat where your instructors meant to be, and you think what if it all goes wrong? What do I do?)
While many activities might require more skill than flying, few are more unforgiving of minor mistakes. This contributes to the seal of approval that coming back in one piece confers. And this is why a peachy landing the most difficult thing to do in flying gives flyers so much satisfaction.
Reading landscape and skyscape
There are also numerous other fringe benefits. Chief among these is the greater understanding of, and affinity with, the natural physical world that learning to fly brings to ordinary, everyday life. The basics of physics, meteorology and navigation are practical things of general interest that it is rewarding to know. I recognise clouds and know what they forecast. I know and understand something that most people are not even aware of at allair. I know, by the colour and shape of the landscape, where to look for different kinds and qualities of air. I sense, because I am in it, every change, when it is light, thin, hard, soft, slippery, dense, sodden, smooth, bumpy.
I have acquired a sense of direction, and have become more aware of my orientation and how the world fits together, as well as understanding more local aspects of geography and topography. My sight is sharper, because my life has depended on it, and I have learnt how to look. (The effects of cloud shadows, scale, aerial flattening and different lights are dramatic.) Rather than merely seeing a view determined by the course of a road, railway, canal or footpath, I now have an overall picture of how the landscape fits together and I have the power to choose the view I want for myself. As a result, I understand it better.
As yachtsmen arrive via ports or the coast, so the pilot also arrives in places in a new way. The first time I flew cross-country to a real destination, rather than just coming and going from the same airfield, it was a revelation. Arriving, literally, out of the blue was a new, strange and bizarrely disorientating (or orientating) experience. Apart from seeing the world differently because I am looking down upon it (and things look very different from 500 or 5,000 feet), a more important discovery is the genuinely new and unfamiliar environment: the sky, with all its novel weather and lighting effects. As in high-altitude mountaineering, entering this place above the clouds has a Jack-in-the-Beanstalk effect. I feel removed from the mundanities of the terrestrial world. Even when I gaze up into the clouds from the ground, as a pilot I feel a gratifying sense of superiority over my fellow men.
Then there are the old-fashioned, simple, tactile pleasures of tinkering with funnels and jerry cans and maps and compasses, and of wrapping up well before going up. Aeroplanes are still, at heart, primitive mechanical objects (the fancy electronics are mainly about navigation and communication). They make a soothing counterpoint to the silent and invisible high technology of the digital age.
But what is the most important thing? Because flying has such disarmingly specific minimum proficiency requirements do things right, I live; do them wrong, I dont a flight that I return from safely is a perfect, unarguable parcel of proof of being in control and on top of things. It is not an impression. For the time I am flying, I am in control; I have to be.
However out of control the rest of my life seems and frequently it seems very out of control indeed flying has the soothing effect of demonstrating that not everything is as out of control as I might think. The effect, ironically, is to earth and ground me, to make me feel real. It is this, more than anything, which makes the afterglow so incomparable. I am convinced that a judicious participation in aeroplaning provides a man with a fine mental tonic wrote the great British pioneer aviator Claude Grahame-White in 1911. I hear people very often talking about Brain Fag. Businessmen, too, complain very often that they want a change and need bucking up. I already foresee that, in future, flying will come to be regarded as one of the greatest health givers. It will not be long, in my opinion, before doctors tell ailing men to go in for a course of aviation.
Single-engine flying in Britain is frustrating at the best of times. The flying I do, in an open cockpit, is simultaneously slow and tiring, uncomfortable and inconvenient. As a method of getting from A to B, it is less efficient than a car, and probably less efficient than a bicycle. But as a way of taking me away from the nagging uncertainties of life, that single engine even if it is a misfiring 500 cc two-stroke pinched from a Snowmobile is a highly effective mode of transport.
