REAL PILOTS

Now listen, please, because I think that you should be sitting down when you read this, after all these years of me telling you stories about the fun which I have enjoyed while flying aeroplanes...So here we go.

AM NOT A ‘REAL’ PILOT! I was not born I with Avgas or Avtur in my blood.

I never dreamed of dancing the skies on laughtersilvered wings, because I knew that I was just a simple 26-year-old soul, who had just enough of ‘The Right Stuff’ in me to build a dairy to milk forty seven Friesian cows on Kilimanjaro. Flying aeroplanes was simply not even on my horizon.

Basically I was just too ‘thick’ even to think of becoming one of those Heroes who had so recently won the Second World War, which had incidentally cost me the loss of my Father and four of my Uncles, not to mention the fifty-two thousand unbelievably brave aviators who had launched into the flame-filled skies over Europe, night after night, never to return.

No...Flying was definitely NOT on my list of ‘Career Opportunities’...maybe I simply didn’t have the ‘Guts’ for that sort of thing.

Little did I know.

Read more in this months edition..