WEEKEND COLUMNISTS “Is that wise?” Life has become so hectic that the only way I seem able to communicate with Mr M between 07.00 and 21.00 every day is by e-mail. This particular inquiry came during an exchange that had started with me telling him that we were going to take Cost Centre #1 out for lunch on his 20th birthday. In Newcastle upon Tyne.
“Are we going by train or car?” e-mailed Mr M in reply. Neither, I wrote back. We are going by plane. Piloted by me.
I am delighted to tell you that I am now a qualified PPL(A) and can take passengers along with me as I cruise the skies of central England. Newcastle upon Tyne is 255 miles from Oxford as the crow flies, and also as I fly. In a little Piper PA28 at about 95 knots it is therefore more than two hours away. But how fabulous to be able to go up for lunch, looking down at everywhere on the way, and then come home again in time for dinner! The poor boy will soon be living in dread of his mother turning up at the drop of a hat.
For the one or two of you who have written to condemn me for continuing to fly and suggesting I should be spending the money on school fees instead, let me assure you that if I could have kept everyone in school by giving up flying, I would have. But the whole exercise, which has taken from March 2008 to October 2009, interrupted by a poor August in ’08 and an equally useless July in ’09, has cost less than one term’s school fees for one child. That is not a measure of how cheap it is to learn to fly, it is a measure of how ridiculously expensive our schools have become in the UK.
The final three days of my journey towards qualifying as a pilot saw me take my radio telephony exam, my final written exam and then my skills test. I was not surprised that I passed the written exam, Flight Planning and Performance. Most of it is physics and about doing balance/mass calculations: how does the centre of gravity of an aircraft move if you fly for three hours and use up lots of fuel, and so on. In practice, with me at the controls, the answer is straightforward – I weigh so much more than the average female pilot that the aircraft’s centre of gravity doesn’t move much at all. But exams are not real life – all women pilots wear a size 10 dress as far as I can see.
Before I submitted my paperwork to the Civil Aviation Authority I bought a new logbook and copied out my original one, which was, I am ashamed to say, a little scruffy. One pilot with an immaculately completed logbook was Sir Keith Park, who even while directing the Battle of Britain and flying around airfields in the summer of 1940 filled his in meticulously. For those of you lucky enough to have been at the unveiling of his statue on Wednesday last, you will have seen a facsimile of a 1940 page from his logbook in the programme. The journey from the idea first mooted in this column in September 2007, that there should be a proper memorial to him in Trafalgar Square, to the arrival of his likeness on the Fourth Plinth, has taken a little longer than my pilot training, but not much. And as both things show, where there is determination, and a lot of support, it is possible to accomplish what might have seemed impossible.
I am sad that I never met Sir Keith Park. But I do know that had I told him that I planned to fly to Newcastle upon Tyne, he would have been very unlikely to reply: “Is that wise?”
PS. As well as celebrating my new-found status as a pilot, I am also sending out bottles of Krug to the three winners of my reader competition a few weeks ago: Anthony Robson, Sharifah Amirah and Angela Woodburn. And an honourable mention to Alexandra Wilson (“cost centres are people too”) who prefers alcopops to Krug. Thank you everyone who wrote in.
