A crash course in flying microlights by Jonathan Hall

I’d always wanted to be a writer. In fact, I wrote my first book at age twelve: two school exercise books in which I handwrote a saga entitled MUTINY!! (yes, all caps and two exclamation marks) about a group of children who rise up against their adult oppressors. In the first battle, we, er… I mean, ‘they’ fight with broomsticks and homemade canons that shoot flaming loo rolls. By the final page (eighty-two, each one painstakingly numbered), things have escalated, and the children have stolen a plane and, on their way to Africa, are dropping ‘electric water balloons’ on army tanks.

It may not astonish you to learn that ten years later, when this current microlighting story takes place, MUTINY!! hadn’t yet found a publisher. In fact, it still hasn’t. Which reminds me, film rights are also available.

Anyway, it was now 1985, and I had just left University College London with a pointless English degree. I had two career choices presented to me, neither of which was writing. The first was to go into my father’s shipping brokerage; the business was very successful and pretty undemanding (I’d done holiday work there), and it had my dad’s name above the door. The second was in publishing; my mum had arranged an interview at a small publishing house owned by a friend of hers. I wouldn’t be writing, of course, but I’d be in that world. Naturally, because I didn’t much care, I aced the publishing interview. So, there it was: shipping or publishing. Dad or mum.

The great thing about parents in the middle of a divorce is the spoiling: the gifts, the money, the competition. Each gave me a few hundred quid and encouraged me to take six months and go away and think about my future. I took them at their word and went far away, to New Zealand, in fact, the other side of the world. Perhaps turning everything upside down would bring clarity. And in the meantime, I’d be having a super-cool, extended holiday.

I took a westerly route, which meant first crossing the USA, then the Pacific Ocean. I bought a rusted-out, old station wagon in New York and spent a couple of months camping in state parks: autumn colors and moonshine in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, alligators and moonrises in the Okefenokee swamps of Georgia, and rattlesnakes and dust devils in Texas. I was forcing myself to be outdoorsy and adventurous. I was like one of those animals born in concrete zoos when they’re released into a grassy meadow for the first time: I didn’t know whether to romp in it, roll in it, or eat it. I was treating the trip like a last hurrah before being taken back to my enclosure and stuck behind a desk for the rest of my life.

When I finally reached California, I sold the car (not easy in Los Angeles: they’re not familiar with rust and treat it as car cancer), then decided to treat myself to something I’d had in mind for some time: flying a microlight aircraft.

Microlights are, essentially, hang-gliders with engines. Since I’d first heard about them in my teens, I’d been enthralled by the idea that for just a couple of thousand quid and with minimal training, anyone could be a pilot. I’d immediately started to fantasize about improbable, long-distance journeys, navigating from landmark to landmark, landing on roads, refilling at petrol stations, sleeping in barns, being fêted by locals… By which, as a teenager, I really meant fawning girls.

I found a flying school in the San Bernadino mountains, near Palm Springs, that turned out to be two young dudes living in trailers in the desert next to a hundred-yard-long strip of tarmac. Who knows why it was there; maybe it was once an actual landing strip, maybe a section of unfinished road… Either way, the desert was slowly reclaiming it. There was also a tumbledown barn nearby, which served as a hangar. The two of them were living off-grid, lounging around on a beat-up sofa and armchairs under a torn awning, surrounded by engine parts, and building kit planes and microlights for fun. Jeff, who looked a bit like Bob Dylan, was the engineer, mechanic, and money (or, at least, his father was), and Rick was the test pilot. And with his cavalry-officer mustache, clear blue eyes, and air of calm authority, Rick certainly looked the part: as if he’d just stepped from the cockpit of a Sopwith Camel after a dogfight with the Red Baron. I was intimidated by both of them. They were what I wanted to be, a man of action and vision, not someone who couldn’t decide between a job in shipping and a job in publishing.

Rick and I put on our crash helmets and maneuvered the three-wheeled microlight out of the hangar and onto the tarmac. The seats were like two side-by-side deckchairs hanging directly beneath the engine, so, combined with our crash helmets, it was clear there’d be no in-flight chat. Without ceremony, we strapped in; Rick clicked the ignition, the engine roared to life, and we immediately started to trundle forward. The microlight picked up speed until, at full throttle, Rick pulled back on the joystick and eased us off the ground. Simple as that. It had taken no more than fifty yards.

The first thing I noticed—was relieved to notice—was that there was no feeling of vertigo. We climbed laboriously for a few minutes, and then we were… up there. In the sky, as if we belonged, looking down over the desert and rocky outcrops and fruit groves, with Palm Springs in the distance. Rick tapped my arm and directed my attention toward two or three birds of prey circling near us. He grinned at me, pushed the throttle lever a little further forward, and headed towards them. When we were closer, he gave me a reassuring thumbs up before reaching up and turning off the engine. Suddenly, we were gliding. Soundless except for the wind. And we could talk.

“Cool, huh?” he said, indicating the huge birds. “Buzzards. They drift around up here for hours without a single flap of the wings. Let’s hang out.”

And that’s what we did: we followed the birds as they slid off the top of one thermal, dropped to the bottom of the next, and then spiraled upwards in a widening gyre until the pattern repeated. We were birds! I’d never even imagined that degree of freedom. From everything. A total release from the everyday world.

Rick provided commentary. He told me the birds were actually turkey vultures, though everyone called them buzzards; he told me that he’d once done this same thing with a Californian condor. He pointed out a truck kicking up a huge plume of dust as it plowed across the desert; an incongruously emerald green golf course; a ranch with a vast, guitar-shaped swimming pool; the I-10 freeway that linked Los Angeles to Jacksonville, Florida, on the other side of the continent. It was like standing on a map.

When Rick eventually decided to head for home, he explained that he wouldn’t restart the engine until we were well away from the orchards because the illegal immigrant fruit pickers thought microlights were police planes and would scatter.

Once we were in powered flight again, my final highlight was to be allowed – by gestures again – to take control of the joystick; first of all, with Rick’s hand hovering over mine, then on my own (although with Rick keeping a vigilant side-eye on me). I was piloting!

That evening, I remember writing a long, lyrical letter to my parents describing the experience as exhilarating and elemental, like sailing in the air. I rhapsodized that it had literally added a new dimension to my life: height, to go with the width and length of terrestrial life. And there was some stuff about being in the moment, with no past and no future. I wrote out the same letter twice, one to mum and one to dad. Handwrote. This was 1985 – no laptops, no Ctrl+P to print.

A month later, I arrived in Tauranga, a port city three hours south of Auckland, keen to resume microlighting. After my extraordinary introductory flight in California, soaring with buzzards, my very first flight in New Zealand was just as memorable. Fifteen minutes into a trial flight with instructor Pauline, we chanced upon a pod of orcas. Protocol required us to circle above them so that any swimmers – surfers, in this case – would be alerted to keep clear, but it also provided us a bird’s eye view as the two adults and a calf migrated at a leisurely pace along the beach.

Three weeks later came the day of my first solo flight. It started, as usual, with a series of circuits of the airfield (‘touch-and-go’s), with Pauline next to me, closely supervising my take-offs and landings. Then, after one particularly nice landing, she signaled me to taxi to a standstill at the side of the runway, whereupon she casually climbed out and instructed me to repeat the exercise on my own. Yikes!

Taking off and flying is actually easy; it’s landing that’s hard. Landing smoothly, anyway. And the reason it’s hard is because it’s counter-intuitive. When you’re hurtling towards the earth, your instinct is to fixate on the point of impending impact. But that doesn’t work. It’s impossible to tell how far off the ground you are by staring down at it. The way to know how far off the ground you are is to look straight ahead and allow the horizon, perspective, and the buildings you see in your peripheral vision to give you cues. You need to trust yourself. That does work. But it takes practice.

My instructor, Pauline, was a lovely, patient, older lady with one particular quirk: in order to be heard over the sound of the engine, she’d spent years forcing her voice, which made her sound like a New Zealand version of Terry Jones playing Mrs Cohen in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. It tended to undermine the serious pronouncements she made that I knew she wanted me to remember: “Maintain thine airspeed lest the ground arise and smite thee” (the smooth flow of air over your wings – airspeed – is what keeps you airborne); or “The only time you have too much fuel is when you’re on fire” (makes sense); or “Don’t make turns at low altitude” (whenever you make a turn, you lose altitude, so that makes sense, too). I think she wanted these sayings to be axiomatic, words to live your life by, like “measure twice, cut once.” However, as pertinent as they were to flying, I couldn’t immediately see any wider relevance. It turned out I was wrong…

I was so in love with flying microlights that I bought a tenth share in one with the registration Tango Echo November (TEN, geddit?) and took it on local flights at every available opportunity. It was a couple of weeks later, on a beautiful, still, clear day (perfect flying weather), that I took TEN up for a flight I would never forget: the one in which a couple of Pauline’s adages finally came into their own.

I’d been flying for about an hour, nice and low over the endless kiwifruit orchards of Te Puke, and was about a half hour’s direct flight from Tauranga, my home airfield, when I heard, or sensed, some change in the engine noise. Or in the power. Something, anyway, out of the ordinary. And I felt the microlight suddenly struggling to maintain altitude.

The circuit above Tauranga Airfield required me to rejoin at an altitude of one thousand feet, but I was below that. I needed to climb (Pauline in her Monty Python voice: “Altitude is always your friend.”). And, in case something went wrong, it was best to try climbing here, where the landscape directly below me looked lovely, flat, and easy to land on. And go wrong it did. I climbed a couple of hundred feet, but the engine was straining more and more until, suddenly, there was a BANG!, followed by zinging sounds. Bullet holes ripped through the fabric of the wings. A bullet pinged off my helmet. Jesus! I was being shot at!

Of course, I wasn’t being shot at!

I learned later that the holes had been made by ball bearings. A housing the size of my fist that connected the engine to the propeller had cracked, spraying ball bearings like a loosely held machine gun. Both the engine and the propeller were working perfectly; it was just that they were no longer connected. I knew none of this at the time. I only knew that, right now, there was no power, and I had, effectively, been introduced to solo hang-gliding at an altitude of one thousand feet. And in an aircraft that was not designed for gliding. Where were those buzzards when I needed them? Where were those Californian thermals? In fact, my crippled microlight was sinking at a rate of five-to-one: that’s five microlights forwards for every one microlight downwards. Not exactly plummeting, but in aviation terms, not far off. I didn’t have much time to make the crucial decision: where, precisely, was I going to make my emergency landing?

I turned the engine off, so it was just me and the wind. And my decisions. The first essential was that I had to land into the wind; planes always land into the wind because it adds extra lift, which makes landing slower and softer. Into the wind, by my calculations, meant thataway. Fine. So, next, I had to figure out exactly which of those luscious meadows I was going to aim for. I was, remember, over a flat, green landscape—a billiard table—and still high enough (just) that I could choose just about anywhere to set down. Spoiled for choice.

However, not long into my precipitous descent, it began to occur to me that, from a thousand feet up, maybe quite a lot of that part of New Zealand looks like a billiard table. As I got lower and lower, I started to notice some serious obstacles: barbed wire here, a tree there, sheep… everywhere. That field was glittering suspiciously as if it was water-logged; that one wasn’t flat at all; was that an electricity pylon? In which case, which way did the cables go? Where was the next pylon along?

At around five hundred feet, I’d chosen my field and was in reasonable shape to land in it: maybe a little low, maybe not perfectly upwind, but not bad. Then, at around a hundred feet – around four times my microlight’s wingspan—I suddenly doubted my choice. And right there, next to it, was a better field: flatter, firmer, more room.

I twitched the joystick towards my new target, and that’s when I heard Pauline’s Monty Python squawk in my head: “Don’t make low turns.” Genuinely, it felt like I actually heard it. In a fraction of a second, I adjusted back toward my original field.

I was coming in unavoidably fast and steep but still, somehow, managed to set the machine onto the ground like a hand smoothing a duvet. I even managed to ease back the joystick at the perfect moment, lifting the microlight’s front wheel, stopping it from digging into the soft ground, and putting a final brake on the descent.

The long grass helped cushion the landing and slow the tires until I rolled to a complete, gentle stop. And by that time, I knew I was absolutely fine—not even a bruise. I unbuckled, climbed out, and reeled a few steps backward. Wow! I looked around to see if anyone had witnessed this momentous event, but there was no one in sight, only the incurious and, frankly, ungrateful flock of sheep on whose backs I hadn’t landed.

The thing about an emergency landing is that once you’ve made it, it feels like it might not have been an emergency at all. You wonder if you’d made too much of the situation. I walked around the aircraft a couple of times, and the microlight was mostly okay, too, apart from the bullet holes and the disconnected propeller shaft protruding at a wonky angle from the engine. And it hit me that I hadn’t overreacted. It had been a genuine emergency. And I’d come through it unscathed. And I’d learned that I could be calm in a crisis. I couldn’t have known that beforehand. How could I? Nor did I know if it would be a transferable quality, or specific to microlight predicaments. But still a good sign; better calm than flustered.

With nothing else to do, I left my stricken microlight and yomped across the fields and fences toward a distant farmhouse. Enjoying my new lease of life, I took my time; I sauntered. And by the time I got there, I’d made the decision about my future that I’d come to New Zealand to make.

And it turned out that Pauline’s words of wisdom did have a broader meaning after all, at least to me. Both shipping and publishing suddenly felt like ‘turns at low altitude,’ distractions from my goal when what was needed was a clear plan and an unwavering pilot.

And when I’d nailed my landing, it was because I’d kept my head up, looked forward, and trusted myself. If ever there was a life lesson, that was it.

I was going to give writing a proper go.

MUTINY!! 2, anyone?