There are lots of reasons: a career, for fun, because you always wanted to: everyone has their own reasons. Here are mine!
Everyone needs a strategy to de-stress. Work is hard (& seems to be getting harder!). Taking the worries and problems of each day home is no fun at all. Personally, I need a way to distance myself from work at the end of the week and regain a proper perspective on all those frustrations and seemingly insoluble problems. So I go flying. It is, as pastimes go, a relatively solitary one since most of us who indulge fly alone. If you want an activity with a social side, stick to golf! Flying an aeroplane can be a very busy activity, and while you are doing it there is no real time to worry or even to think about much else. A one-hour flight gives me a real mental work-out, and I find it is usually enough to help me regain a proper perspective. Flying is, I find, the ultimate pick-me-up. It exercises a different, yet complementary set of skills to those required by work.
Piloting an aeroplane requires above all the ability to multitask, to pick out key facts, and to manage workload. Just like work in fact. The actual flying is the easy bit. It simply requires a reasonable degree of hand, foot and eye coordination (psychomotor skills, to use the jargon). Steering a course and maintaining a set height is straightforward. However, at the same time there are several other things to do. One must listen to constant radio chatter, and use it to build up a mental picture of all the traffic in the sky around you. Some of it may be heading towards you, and if it is the military they will be going very fast! In busy places like southern England the talk is almost constant. Every now and then air traffic control (ATC) will actually address you, and it is important to notice when you are spoken to and reply promptly. Keeping a good lookout is also vital. Not everyone in the sky has a radio or shows up on ATC’s radar (think of hot air balloons, microlights, gliders, flocks of geese and so on). As a pilot you are responsible for spotting and avoiding all other flyers. Finally, there is navigation, which basically involves identifying things on the ground. For my sort of flying navigation is a matter of maps, compasses and a stopwatch. And looking for smoke from bonfires and chimneys to see if the wind has changed.
There is no room for complacency or incompetence in flying. Kipling wrote some lines that have always seemed to me to be particularly applicable to aeroplanes, although as far as I know he never encountered one:
But remember, please, the Law by which we live,
We are not built to comprehend a lie,
We can neither love, nor pity, nor forgive.
If you make a slip in handling us you die!
Kipling: The Secret of the Machines
To avoid “slips” the learning process is never-ending. There is no such thing as a minor aircraft accident, the ground is too hard and unforgiving! Unlike car drivers, pilots have to take a new driving test every two years for each license they hold. There are separate licences for basic flying, night flying, instrument flying, and for different kinds of aeroplane. Each licence has a fixed duration: so there is a constant need for re-training and assessment, which means that for a fair amount of the time one is a student under instruction. I find it very educational to be reminded just how hard learning can be!
Flying is a strange activity in another way. It can require quite rapid decision-making based on mental arithmetic, and this is where workload management comes in. Aeroplanes fly in invisible, flowing rivers of air. Usually these rivers are horizontal, but sometimes they flow up or down. Pointing the nose of the aeroplane in a particular direction gives no guarantee that you will actually go that way: the flight path is determined by a combination the aeroplane’s speed and heading, and by the speed and direction of the wind.
To understand this think of a boat rowing across a fast-flowing river and trying to hit a particular point on the opposite bank, and then extend the picture into three dimensions. It can be challenging to estimate the heading required to achieve a particular ground-track whilst one is struggling to fly in poor weather and simultaneously replying to instructions from Air Traffic Control. The key is to think ahead: or in other words, manage your workload.
The one thing flying is not very good for is actual travel. There is a saying amongst pilots: “Time to spare? Go by air”! It is all too true. I have – occasionally – flown somewhere for work. There are not many universities that have their own runway, and relatively few with a nearby airfield. I was, for a time, an external examiner at Cranfield (which has a very nice runway), and on a few occasions I did fly to meetings there: but it is a chancy business. It is all too easy for the weather to change, and then you either fail to arrive, or more likely get stuck somewhere because it starts to rain and you can’t fly home. On the whole a car is better. But it is much less fun! So: let’s go flying. I fly from Perranporth in Cornwall. Airfields like Perranporth have an atmosphere all of their own. Airports are large and modern, and are designed for passengers and big jets. Airfields on the other hand were designed for aeroplanes and pilots, and are mostly grass. In the UK most airfields were constructed in the 1940s and evocative (if rather dilapidated) huts and wartime control towers are still common.
All flights begin rather ceremonially with a ritual known as “the walkround”. Bits of the aeroplane are waggled and poked, inspection covers are opened, tyres prodded, and fuel and oil levels checked. Going flying is always a little bit frightening. This is a Good Thing, since it induces a proper caution in pilots. The walkround is intended to make sure that the aeroplane is ready to go, has enough fuel, no birds or wasps nesting in it, and that there is nothing obviously loose or missing. The ritual is curiously calming and I find it always creates the right mood. Having checked over the aeroplane you climb in and do up the straps. There are lots more checks to do in the cockpit, and memorising these is forbidden (it is considered far too dangerous to rely on memory!). All aeroplanes, even small and simple ones, come with a checklist. For my two-seat aeroplane the pre-flight checks run to four pages of A4.
Once you are ready, strapped in, the cockpit has been closed and the engine is running it is time to take off. This is one of the exciting bits. When the control tower has given permission you open the throttle and bump across the grass, steering with your feet via the rudder pedals. The speed increases slowly as you watch the hedge at the other side of the airfield coming closer. The steering becomes less and less effective as the weight of the aeroplane progressively transfers from wheels to wings. If all is well, flying speed (around 70 miles an hour) is reached before you get to the hedge, and you gently raise the nose by pulling back on the stick. The bumping and some of the noise stops, and there you are, climbing away from the ground. The higher you go, the further you can see, and work-related problems seem to decrease in importance very rapidly as height is gained. England is beautiful from the air: a green patchwork which (even in the south) hardly looks built-up at all. The sea sparkles and places like the Isle of Wight (a favourite of mine) are really stunning. Watching the sun go down over Bournemouth with the Needles in the foreground is one of my favourite experiences.
The man-made things that stand out most, apart from the big cities, are archaeological features: Roman roads run across the country for hundreds of miles, sometimes taking the form of a modern highway and sometimes just a hedge or line of trees. Bronze-age earthworks circle the hill-tops, and you only get a true picture of places like Avebury or Stonehenge from above. And the higher you go, the less work and its problems seem to matter. On a really clear day the distances are truly amazing: from two miles up over Hampshire I have, simply by turning my head, seen France, South Wales, the Thames estuary and the curve of East Anglia.
At night a whole new world opens up. There is almost no sensation of movement because the air is so much smoother than during the day. Chains of light lie like scattered jewels across a velvety blackness, and on a moonlit night the clouds look frosty, beautiful and remote. Sometimes I land at another airfield. This is always interesting: for example, the approach to one of my favourites, Perranporth, involves flying out to sea and then turning back and landing on the cliff-top.
Going to France is exciting, not least because you have to talk to French air traffic controllers. Crossing the channel is not really dangerous, but we always wear life-jackets and have an inflatable boat in position ready on the back seat, just in case the engine stops. It all adds to the fun. Mostly I just fly rather aimlessly around southern England. It is very satisfying to leave Thruxton, explore Somerset, follow the Channel coast east as far as Chichester, and return to Thruxton, all within an hour or so. At the end of each flight there is (usually!) the satisfaction of a executing a competent arrival. This is the second exciting part of most flights. There is a real fulfillment to be found in precision flying. The approach to any airfield involves flying around an invisible rectangular pattern in the sky with precisely defined heights at the corners, known as “the circuit”. The circuit is quite small, usually about two miles long by one across, and it is not uncommon for it to be occupied by several other aircraft all moving at 100 mph or so. It is like driving fast around a busy roundabout with the added fun of there being a third dimension to manage. At bigger airfields the circuit pattern may be supplemented by radio beacons and there are on-board instruments to record their distance and direction. Sometimes there is an instrument landing approach or ILS to help you down through clouds.
If you are using an ILS then a different technique is needed. As well as controlling the plane and talking to ATC, you must fly your aircraft in such a way that a pair of crossed needles stay centred over a bulls-eye target. One needle tells you if you are high or low, and the other to the left or right of the approach path. It takes practice but is very satisfying when you get it right! For those interested in the technicalities, ILS consists of an extremely narrow radio beam projected upwards at a shallow angle from the end of runway. The aeroplane has to fly down the centre of the beam, and if this is done properly the otherwise-invisible runway should appear out of the murk just in time for you to land on it. This is instrument flying at its most demanding, and it is really hard: but rewarding if done well.
After landing, taxiing back to the hanger and switching off, I like to slide back the canopy and just sit there for a few minutes in the cool evening air, listening to the dying whine of the gyros as I complete my paperwork. Each flight has to be logged and there are always forms to fill in. There is a special sort of quiet that comes over an airfield after the last plane of the day has landed: a semi-silence containing the noise of rooks, the sound of wind around the hangers and the clatter of a distant grass-cutting tractor. There is also a slight feeling of relief to be savoured (flying is, after all, completely un-natural, and it can be scary at times). I suppose it has that in common with sports like mountaineering. And however bad a week I have had, that Friday evening flight somehow sets it all into perspective.