Trial Flights not Tribulations

I am completely exhausted. My brain is racing, my body is just not keeping up.

You see, I have just come home from Staverton (Gloucester) Airport where a very nice Flying Instructor by the name of Phil Matthews took me up in Mike India (MI) the Cotswold Aero Club's Eurostar Microlight.

This was a day that reminded me what it is I love about aviation and flying; what a fantastic way to spend an hour.

Forget any images of microlight as open cockpit, hang-glider with a motor. The Eurostar is an all metal two seat, low wing, Rotax powered "Three-Axis" aircraft.  

Now, I'm in no sense an experienced pilot but I have taken flights in amongst others Dh Chipmunks, Cessna 172 and 182s and I have solo'd in a Robin DR400-140. Nothing I have been in leapt off the runway like we did today. It felt like the wheels only turned a couple of times before we we flying and we climbed like a cable-launched glider.

Then up to 3000ft over the South West of the UK with scattered clouds a few hundred to a thousand feet above and traffic in the region varying from Cessna 150 to Citation, the Fairchild Swearingen Metroliner returning from the Isle of Man and several helicopters using the airfield for transport or training.

An hour of flying and the only time I wasn't in control of the aircraft was for take-off, the end of final approach and a simulated engine failure (by retarding the throttle), choosing and setting up for an engine-out landing in a local field before power on and climb-out. Note to self: think hard before asking the Instructor if he has a field picked out if the engine fails.

Cruise-climb, steady turns, clean and full-flap stalls, bouncing around in thermals and ridge wave turbulence, I even had fun taxiing.

So that's the story. I flew, I loved it.

Well, no actually. That's not the whole story.

A short while ago I wrote a preachy post about getting others interested in aviation. I said that I would take my son to the airfield to see if he would enjoy it.

So here he is:

.

My wife says while I was flying he sat still and watched the planes heading off and coming back, moving about the airfield and refuelling. This is a boy that never sits still.

If he never has anything more to do with aviation so be it. Today, like every day, I was proud of him.