Look at me Mummy, I’m up here. That’s where it all started…up there with my head stuck out of the top of a Beech tree. High enough to be beyond reach and low enough to be seen by Mummy and other jealous members of the congregation.
A hint of danger..a sniff of adventure…not too much, but just enough to elicit a barely suppressed sigh of admiration from that delightful little Annie down there.
Once I was back down on the ground, I would be able to look up at the top of ‘My’ tree and say to myself, “I was up there!” with a barely veiled grin spreading across my face…the growing branches of a living thing having given me access to views not available to my more faint-hearted siblings.
The same feeling applies to aeroplanes for me. After more than 18,000 hours I am still definitely happier when I am within shouting distance of the ground.
I am used to flying over my house and shouting to my wife out of the cockpit window to ask her to come and pick me up from the airport. Once I get much above Flight level 120 I lose the sense of Flight and the view out of the window might as well be on a simulator screen. It is much more interesting if you can still see the people on the ground…particularly if one of them is that delightful little Annie!
‘helicopters shouldn’t really fly at all’
There is another feature of aircraft which fascinates me in the same way that ships hold me in a state of disbelief…that is the sheer size of the big ones…to watch an enormous airliner brush its sixteen main wheels smoothly onto a runway and lower its immense nose wheel tyres gently on to the ground speaks of an intricate sensitivity to balance.
How a tiny little ant-like creature can sit way up there in the front and have control over everything from those mighty engines to the tiniest servo tab away down the far end at the back, while supported, like a feather, by a vacuous invisible wraith of wind, defies a layman’s belief.
A ship needs a collection of little ants to drive it, of course, but when confronted by the whole massive bulk of steel, sitting, supported solely by water…How is it possible for something with seventeen stories above the waterline and only nine below to float the right way up?
I remember watching one of those monsters as it passed beneath me when I stood on the Forth Road Bridge in Scotland. Suddenly I saw a tiny figure standing on the forward observation platform, by the graceful sweep of the bow. I raised a hand to greet the great ship and was duly amazed when a tiny hand was raised in acknowledgement. It was as though the minute waving arm was just confirming that this gargantuan piece of metal was built and controlled by a tiny waving hand.
By the same token, how is it possible for one person, weighing less than a sack of potatoes, to lift four hundred tons into the air simply by pulling back on a stick?
It just doesn’t seem to make sense…until you look into it a bit closer and then everything suddenly seems to be so logical…If a Piper Cub can fly, then an A380 can too…they are both operating in the same air, so they both need engines, they both need wings and ailerons and flaps and elevators and rudders…in fact, they are really much the same, except that one is a bit bigger and the other is more difficult to fly.
That does not in any way reduce my fascination with ships and aircraft. In fact, if anything it increases the feeling that there is something mysteriously miraculous about them, as though they should not really work at all.
And helicopters?…Now they shouldn’t really fly at all! In fact, I don’t really understand why the whole thing doesn’t just fall to pieces immediately you start the engines.
