You have to have a goal. Mine is to fly to all the islands and capitals of the world where the scenery is good enough. I could fly anywhere. I could go straight to the Grand Canyon but I dont. I may never go there, or if I do I will dawdle my way there. Below is a holiday island and I can see it all at one glance. There’s no mystery and I dont like that. Flying has taught me that most places look good from a few hundred feet and tedious from a few thousand. You need to lose yourself in the scenery. You must penetrate the valleys with their towering wooded sides. I look down into my cockpit. I have a simple aeroplane with a throttle and a speedometer and an altimeter. There are a few other things too that I dont know much about. It has a yoke for steering and a brake which I assume is for when I’m on the ground. You can hardly brake in the air now can you? It’s funny to think that when I started flying I used to point the yoke down if I wanted to descend. You can steer right and left in a car so you ought to be able to steer up and down in an aeroplane. Right? It’s a steering wheel in three dimensions isnt it? Well what was I thinking of. I now realise that you need to increase the throttle to go up and decrease it to go down. You have to work with the air rather than fight it by yanking the yoke. This island isnt part of the United Kingdom. Rather it was a part of the Duchy of Normandy that remained loyal to the English Crown. Its trees are odd. There are too many of them and they’re too big, making it look tropical. Somebody has rooted up all the hedgerows and replaced them with lines of trees, somebody who knows nothing of how things work hereabouts. And they’ve built too many single-storey houses. Millionaires come here because of the low taxes but I cant see anywhere I’d like to live. Currently I have a friend doing the flying for me. Air Traffic Control (ATC) has told him to fly straight in to runway 26. The ATC person has an American accent. He pauses his sentences in the wrong places and with the wrong stress. He says Charlie Tango Sierra … Lima fly straight in runway twenty … six. But my friend doesnt fly straight in. He makes silly corkscrew turns and circles and instead of losing altitude he gains it. He speeds up and heads out over the sea at 4000 feet and I know from experience that he will never land. He will soar into the blue yonder and plunge us into the Bay of Biscay when our fuel runs out. I’m lazy about flying myself so I often delegate it. But I have to stir myself on this occasion so I push him to one side and take the controls. Immediately the plane lurches in my amateur hands and it takes me a while to steady it. I cut the throttle. We lose height and I make a big loop back to the island and the airfield. As I approach the runway the ATC man tells me to go around. No way am I going to go around! He wants me to abort the landing and make another pointless big circle. It’s like asking somebody to stop in mid-pee. I ignore him and touch down. The ATC man has a special angry voice that he reserves for situations like this. You were not cleared to land, he says. Exit the runway immediately. I want to say it was an emergency and I needed to go to the loo, but I have no right of reply.
Blackthorn 