A beautiful September evening.

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boing
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A beautiful September evening.

#1 Post by boing » Sun May 22, 2016 12:47 am

It was a beautiful September afternoon in Southern England. The sky was a cloudless deep blue, the wind was calm and, as the hour approached five o’clock, the activity on the grass airfield began to wane.

There was one aircraft flying in the proximity of the airfield, a yellow Tiger Moth presently being flown by my instructor, Alan Pemberton, and a civilian student. You see, most of the income at this airfield was generated by the training of Royal Air Force pre-induction students but since it was one of the few flying clubs in the area it also served a limited number of aspiring “civilian” pilots.

The Tiger Moth was carrying out spin training. It may seem a little strange that an aircraft would be spinning so close to an active airfield but the hour was getting late, most of the fleet was already on the ground and, heck – we did not even have radios in the aircraft, everything was see and avoid and nobody got excited about a few aircraft in the proximity.

It was a marvelous show, a perfect blue sky, the sound of the Gypsy motor as the aircraft gained height for the next spin and then the sight of a yellow Tiger Moth flicking inverted and into the spin followed by the recovery and a burst of power (?) as the aircraft stabilized.

Let me tell you about Alan, he was the archetypical gentleman flying instructor. If you have ever read any of the traditional flying training books which mention how an instructor should dress and behave Alan was it. He was always very tidily dressed, usually in a long sleeved open neck shirt under a Cashmere pullover with sharply pressed cavalry twill trousers and polished brown leather shoes. Sometimes he threw in a cravat. He was particularly fond of a pair of stylish sun glasses which were equipped with those “coiled spring” type ear pieces that were supposed to keep the glasses in place under all conditions. He was always punctual, always cheerful, always encouraging. I never heard him use one swearword. His patience and dignity appeared endless which is what makes the following event so singular.

The spin training was not going well, we could tell this even from the ground. The entries worked OK, but then, a spin entry is hardly a precision manoeuvre. The problem was the recoveries, they were erratic and imprecise, sometime the recovery appeared to be abandoned too early, rudder neutral before rotation fully stopped, at other times it looked as though the stick had not been held forward for a sufficiently long time for the airspeed to increase.

The last recovery was horrific. The aircraft started to recover, flicked again halfway through the recovery, did something indescribable inverted, entered the spin again and finally recovered rather closer to the ground than we expected. The wings levelled and the aircraft immediately joined the circuit and landed. The aircraft taxied to the parking line where the pilots disembarked, held a quick conversation and both left in their cars without entering the control tower.

We found out the story later by devious means.

Apparently, during the last spin recovery the student had screwed it up badly and managed to get the aircraft doing the “indescribable” things. At this point Alan took control of the aircraft but unfortunately the slipstream through the open cockpit due to the yaw had blown Alan’s cherished sunglasses loose and one of the spring clips designed to hold them firmly in place had come loose from his ear and managed to get into his nose. The force of the slipstream under the glasses had held the spring clip firmly and excruciatingly painfully up Alan’s nose throughout the recovery from the spin which, apparently, made it quite exciting.

OK, so he lost his cool once.
the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.

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limeygal
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Re: A beautiful September evening.

#2 Post by limeygal » Tue May 31, 2016 2:31 pm

Great story :-bd

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