Part Two
In the last article I spoke about how I came close to death (or at least close to having a nervous breakdown) during a disastrous and failed attempt to reach the peak of Ben Nevis. I was emigrating from Britain and before leaving for good, I'd decided to partake in various challenges and sight-seeing expeditions. It was about six months after the Ben Nevis debacle that I began my next journey.
I had a friend who offered to fly me around a bit, shortly after he received his pilots license. I have an interest in photography, so it would be a unique opportunity for me to get some aerial shots of England, and it sounded like it would be a lot of fun. We were due to fly from a small airport in Southern England. If memory serves me correctly, our aircraft was a Piper PA-22. I was trusting my life to a two-seater, single engine, light aircraft that may or may not have been made out of paper.
My friend's name is Tony. Although Tony had only recently finished his training and received his pilot license, I trusted him. He's a sensible guy who wouldn't take any unnecessary risks. He's safely middle-class. Even so, I remember weighing up various odds as the day drew near. A large proportion of car accidents involve people in the same circumstances as Tony. Young drivers who have recently received their license. I remember wondering "Is driving a car more dangerous than flying a plane?". Of course. In a car you're restricted to driving along a narrow piece of tarmac surrounded by other traffic and, sometimes, pedestrians. Sometimes old, unpredictable ones. In a plane you have the freedom of the open skies. You just have to make sure you stay in the sky.
| The first thing I discovered about flying is that the preparation required before you even get to see the plane is very tedious. Tony was planning our route onto a map, and making a note of the various headings we would take. He then had to listen to a recorded weather forecast. Using this forecast, he had to correct our headings for the wind. He also had to make sure that The Red Arrows weren't flying nearby or that there weren't any airshows around. While all this was going on, I was watching people coming in for flying lessons, and those people I saw scared me immensely. | | 
Ready for takeoff |
There were so many idiots. One guy in particular resembled a hunched and ginger version of the now extinct giant sloth. He was either incapable of speech or he was exceedingly unhappy to be flying. He grunted, mostly, but also made a sound a bit like that of an angry bullock. Once into the lobby area, his mother was seeing to all the arrangements. She was a typical middle-class mother trying to involve her son in some kind of extra-curricular activity. He clearly didn't have the aptitude for sports activities. I suppose with Tae-Kwon-Do out the window, this lad seemed to have been roped into the prohibitively expensive pastime of flying. I had to doubt whether he would fit into the cockpit, much less whether the aircraft could lift such a payload.
It was about half-an-hour later as we finally made our way to the Piper PA-22, where we were joined by a member of staff carrying a radio receiver tuned to the tower frequency. We were making pleasant conversation about football and such, when we suddenly heard the giant sloth guy shouting something incomprehensible amongst a burst of static. He was on his first solo flight and had gotten up there before us because his instructor had made his flight plan for him. The member of staff we were walking to the plane with didn't seem to flinch so much as momentarily take on a wry, knowing smile in response to the sloth man's scream.
Our plane was tethered to four barrels of water, two tied to each wing, to stop it from blowing away (no, really). We removed the barrels and "boarded" the aircraft. By boarded, I mean that we scrambled our way into it. We did a pre-flight check and found that my headset didn't work. The spare one was rubbish, but it was all we had. I literally had to shout at the top of my voice to make myself heard. With everything else working, we acquired clearance for taxi and takeoff. Then we were away!
I wanted to fly to Wolverhampton Business Airport, because that's near to where I live. I could have taken aerial photos of my home town as we passed, but like most things involved in flying, it wasn't that simple. There's a lot of controlled airspace that you can't fly into. You don't want to argue with a Boeing 747 traveling at 500mph. Not when you're flying around in something which offers as much protection against a jetliner as you'd get from a sheet of crepe paper. So instead, we planned to fly to a different airport about 50 miles North of us.
Taking off was a great sensation, not unlike when you take off in an airliner for the first time. The difference is that you have a much better view almost all around you. The scale is different, and the sensation is raw. It's the same fun, adrenaline fuelled experience you get when racing a Mini Cooper instead of a Ford Transit van.
Speaking of racing, before we started our flight plan, we took a detour and flew over Silverstone Race Track. There was no major event that day, so we didn't have to worry about crashing into a blimp. We swooped over the track as I fumbled in my bag for my camera. It was around about now that I ended up spoiling everything.
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Tony controls a bewildering array of buttons and switches |
The only seats in the whole plane are the two in the front. There isn't much more room for anything else. Behind the seats there's a little bit of floorspace to dump your bags into. As I pulled out my camera, I threw my fairly hefty bag into the rear of the fuselage. Then, as it hit the floor of the plane, we were rocked in the air. We fell several feet, and I swear I heard a strange sharp sound I couldn't quite recognise come from the flight stick. We then started to gain altitude. Tony swore at me and I looked around trying to look innocent, but only succeeded in giving a confused blustered impression of idiocy.
After a few seconds, the plane was level again and everything seemed okay. Apparently I hadn't taken the word "light" in "light aircraft" seriously enough. I was admonished by Tony for throwing my bag down. We started along our flight plan at 1,000ft. After a couple of minutes of silence, I noticed that Tony was tense. I assumed he was just angry with me, but asked him what was wrong.
"I think the controls are stiff"
"What?" I screamed, my microphone barely picking me up.
"I don't know if it's me or if these controls don't feel right"
"Should we go back, then?"
"Yes... but....I can't be sure...." Tony tailed off.
We continued North for a few more seconds. I wasn't really concerned, and in fact I took a few photographs out of the side of the plane. Tony was a worry-wart. It was only his second flight with a passenger. Thankfully, it's very rare for a plane to develop a mechanical fault. They fly tens of thousands of flights and undergo regular maintenance.
"Ok. We're going back" Tony announced
"Are you okay?" I screamed
"Yes, I'M fine. The plane's not."
"What's wrong?" I asked, thinking a screw might need tightening or a one of the flaps might need a squirt of grease.
"I don't know"
1,000ft Above a field... somewhere | | I don't want to start getting too technical by explaining cockpit flight controls, but I need to explain a little of what is involved in controlling a plane to help you understand what was about to go wrong. When you turn a fixed wing plane, you do so by turning the steering wheel. Of course, you shouldn't let anyone in the aviation industry hear you call it a steering wheel, but that's what it looks like. To turn right, you turn the wheel to the right. Cables running from the controls to the wing cause a small flap on the right hand wing to lift up. This causes a downward force. The right wing drops. The whole plane rolls to the right and the plane begins to turn.
There is a side-effect of this. Because the wings are not horizontal anymore, there's a lot less wind running underneath them. There is less lift. Therefore, you can lose pitch and altitude. In other words, the front of the plane can start to point downwards. As we turned to the right in order to head back to the South, Tony was pulling back in order to compensate for the loss of pitch he was expecting. At this point, the plane did the exact opposite of what would normally happen. Instead of losing pitch, we gained pitch. Added to this Tony was already pulling back on the flight controls. The plane lurched violently upwards and began to ascend aggressively. |
My initial reaction to being thrown back in my seat was to almost swallow my own face, but then I shouted into my barely functioning microphone: "What the fuck?! What the fuck?!"
"Something's fucked" Tony helpfully replied.
He tentatively pushed down on the flight controls to lower our pitch in what we both hoped would be a less violent movement. An alarm in the cockpit began to sound. A continuous high pitched beeping. I recognised this as the stall warning. It's not a good sound to hear. It meant that the plane was losing the fight against gravity. The plane can only climb at a certain rate, based on a few factors: Your speed/amount of thrust, the pitch of the plane and what planet you are currently flying over. You may have heard of gravitational pull, which isn't too strong on Earth. Thank fuck we weren't flying over Jupiter.
If you try to climb too quickly, the plane will lose speed. As it loses speed, less air rushes underneath the wings and you get less lift. Despite the nose pointing up in the air, the plane will begin to fall. Soon afterwards the plane will stall. The effect of stalling is that the front of the plane will start to point downwards and you will then plummet even faster.
Luckily, the stall warning stopped within a couple of seconds as Tony managed to level us out. At this point he began communicating with the control tower. There was stress in his voice, but he generally remained calm. He didn't start screaming "mayday!" or anything, but warned them of a malfunction of the flight controls effecting elevation. He was asked by the control tower if he was declaring an emergency. This is normal procedure. Tony had been explaining the problem and our location, but he hadn't actually told them it was an emergency, and the control tower needed to hear him say as much. The consequence of Tony saying "yes" was that nobody else was allowed to take off or land until we were safely down. We weren't far from the airport at this point. While all this had been going on, Tony had managed to correct our heading for an approach to the active runway, and we'd begun a controlled(!) descent.
| |  Flying over the A1(M) before it all started to go wrong |
I was actually quite scared at this point, and time seemed to pass by fairly quickly. I don't remember much of the conversation. I remember holding onto my camera with sweaty hands, and staring at the climb indicator. This is a little dial which shows your angle of attack. It shows if you're gaining or losing altitude, and at what rate. We were generally losing altitude - a good thing when you're trying to land. Every once in a while, the plane would lurch upwards and the needle would also shoot right up. Tony was trying to fight against the fault we were experiencing by pushing down on the flight controls in opposition to the plane trying to climb on it's own. I remember being snapped out of my bizarre reverie by a motorised mechanical sound which I recognised as the flaps extending.
The flaps slow the plane down for landing. They broke me out of my trance because I knew we were close to touching down. Landing... oh dear. It was at this point that I realised that every fucking arsehole currently at the airport would be watching us. I realised that any little kid with a radio receiver in the area, just like me when I was younger, would be listening to Tony talking to the control tower as he tried to navigate our plane to the runway. They'd all be staring at us through their damn binoculars. I started to feel embarrassed and small and stupid. I felt like everybody would think we were amateurs. Middle-aged men suffering mid-life crises would be stuck on the ground unable to fly their helicopters, which they used to fly around their fancy ladies.
| The runway was just a few hundred feet below and in-front of us. By now, Tony's instructor had made his way to the control tower to help coach us down and keep us calm. We were travelling higher and faster than normal to help prevent the plane stalling if it began flying up on it's own again. Near the ground, there wouldn't be time to correct the plane. There are four lights (called PAPIs) located side by side to the left of the runway. They shine red or white depending on the angle you view them from. The theory is that the two on the left should be white and the two on the right should be red. If they are all red, you're too low. All white lights means you're too high. As we approached, we had three white lights. We were too high.
| | 
The PAPI's are in the top left corner of this picture. |
Not far from touchdown, we had a suffered a particularly strong vertical lurch. This was the worst we'd had since the very first and it took us both by almost as much surprise. The plane gave another stall warning as we both stared up at a nice view of the sky. The stall warning came much sooner this time, because we were travelling more slowly, and we felt the plane sinking. At this point I was more scared than I'd been at any other part of this damn flight, and I remember dropping my not-insignificantly expensive camera.
The plane stopped sinking as we levelled out. We were over the top of the runway now, and a little too high The flaps were fully extended at this point. Tony took off nearly all power. The front of the plane jerked upwards again. I had been looking around the airport. As the front of the plane began to rise again, so too did the horizon begin to sink from view. I noticed a dozen or more people stood outside various buildings around the airport who were watching our descent before they disappeared from view along with the horizon. Just before I lost sight of the ground, I thought I saw.... oh fucker! I saw the ginger sloth guy watching us. My God, he looked pleased with himself.
We started to sink again, with no view of land through our elevated angle. Tony gave us some power to slow our fall. I imagined the ginger sloth guy, laughing and cackling, rolling around on the floor eating grass, drooling and possibly soiling himself with glee. His mother was there, too. A witch. She was there casting spells on our plane, cackling with her stupid green witches face. I hated the ginger sloth guy. I hated him and I hated his mum and I hated every... I received a shocking blow as we hit the ground and bounced back up again.. my teeth clattered together.
Although we bounced, the second time we touched the ground, we stayed there. There were two runways at the airport which intersected to form the shape of a cross. As we passed the intersection of the other runway, two fire engines swung in behind us, following along like some kind of bizarre convoy. There was also an ambulance parked ominously on the grass. Under the instruction of the control tower, Tony taxi'd us back to a parking area. People were waving to us in a form of chivalry and congratulations like a much cheaper version of a scene from NASA Space Control when Apollo 13 made it back to Earth. Tony was told he'd done a good job over the radio. I noticed the ginger sloth guy. He was waving at us now. So was his Mum. Maybe he wasn't so bad, afterall.
It wasn't until a few days later that we were able to find out what went wrong. One of the cables that controls the plane had malfunctioned. There weren't any signs of it (or none that had been reported) until we used the plane. I got some pretty decent aerial photographs, so it was almost worth the ordeal. Tony and I also made friends with the Ginger Sloth Guy. He actually enjoyed flying and wasn't at all middle-class. Well, maybe a bit. His Dad owned a Newsagents in Northamptonshire and we got talking about how I'm a photographer-wannabe. He suggested that if I had any decent shots from the part of the flight where we were over Northamptonshire, then I should get them printed as postcards and he could sell them in the shop. That didn't quite work out, but as the front of a T-Shirt once almost said: I went all the way through the ordeal and all I got was this lousy story.
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