PLANE TALK - JIM DAVIS
EARLY DAYS ON THE
GARDEN ROUTE I was 26 when I opened my first flying school in George. Then I moved around the garden route a bit before starting 43 Air School. Then uni, then Oz and finally, three years ago I moved back to the area. Now, I keep coming across people who remind me of those days. 26 SEEMED A GOOD AGE TO SETTLE DOWN and be a proper person. I had been living out of my nav-bag for a couple of years and trailing a wife and infant from one country flying club to the next. I bought Mike van Ginkel’s abandoned flying school in George. The school came with a training license, which although not a requirement at the time, I thought added some dignity to the establishment. It also gave me the right to lease a brick building which was little bigger than a two seater horse box. It had started life as an ablution block on the original RAF war-time base.
claimed it was a forgery, so I would cough up again. No matter, Mike was exceptionally good company, an excellent drinking companion, and probably the best instructor I have ever met. The George airfield, with its grass runways, had been the home of the RAF’s Empire Training Scheme’s 61 Air School, which used Ansons for coastal recce flights and for training navigators. I think not always with great success – the Outiniqua mountain range is not short of dead Ansons that met their maker either at night or in cloud.
t he Outiniqua mount ains ar e not s hor t of dead Ans ons
But its main attraction was the price. Mike wanted R20 for it, but I am not one to back away from a bit of horse trading, and I eventually beat him down to R10. It’s true I tell you. For years after that, every time I saw him, he would insist that I had never actually paid him. I took to carrying his receipt around in my wallet, but he
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Anyhow, I put up a handpainted sign over the door of my shack. I didn’t want to confine my customers to student pilots – after all I might do charter flights, or aerial photography, or crop-spraying – who knows what the future might hold? I could also foresee that my empire might even expand as far as Riversdale or Oudtshoorn. So, to allow for this contingency I proudly called myself “Cape Flying Services”.
