In a cheap hotel in Macon at the top of the Rhone Valley, about 30 miles north of Lyons, where Ross Smith got to on the first flight to Australia on his first day in 1919. I haven’t looked out of the window, but I hope the rain has cleared. I am expecting fog anyway.
Stats: I took off at 0900, from Biggin Hill on March 7, 2007, landed in Le Touquet at 1000. T/O again from LT at 1250, landed Macon, 1715. Total distance, about 400 statute miles in 5h25m, the same distance as Keith Reynolds and I did on the first day of the world flight, but much faster. I think I damaged my radio, though.
The day started early. I was down in the hotel reception awaiting RMH on time, 0545, and we found our way along bleak and wet Croydon streets to the Whitgift car park.
Jon Cook was on the phone, waiting for us a mile away in his own car, we drove to Biggin Hill, were greeted by Joanna Conlon and Sophie Consett, and I concealed my uneasiness by trailing along behind them and then walking off to be sick. I had eaten no breakfast, so at first nothing came up, then the previous night’s hamburger - bits of it - appeared, and I was able to recover. I think this was nerves. It had not happened at the beginning of previous adventures. No one saw me.
Brian Milton, Miles Hilton-Barber and Richard Meredith-Hardy at Biggin Hill about 30 minutes before the first flight Brian had made in the aircraft RMH and I set about the aircraft, RMH being as colourful as ever in his comments on the hotchpotch wiring, and we managed to get bits attached to the microlight. Outside, there was low cloud and spotty rain, altogether unprepossessing. TV cameramen - I couldn’t see any newspaper men - turned up, and MHB did his song and dance about ‘Seeing is Believing’ and said all the right things. My apprehensions about my own fitness for this job went away, I joined in the song and dance, though honest about not having flown the aircraft, and it was obvious that no searching questions were being asked. It was ‘soft’ news. By 0845 RMH had got us into the aircraft, dramatised the door opening for the TV crews, pushed us out on to the tarmac, and we were ready to go.
There was a lot of interviewing, and then everyone took photos, group shots of this or that, PR girls, airport staff, so on. RMH said he would cope with the flight plan, I could see blue sky coming from the west, I warmed the microlight up and we taxied to the threshold. RMH had already started the camera, and MHB was in media mode. With his hand firmly on the instructor bar, he did his piece to camera as if me, in the front, was only there to monitor his flying, and at 0900, I started the take-off.
The aircraft took a very long time to unstick, and jiggled about in the morning turbulence. It was not difficult to control, just different to anything I had flown. I circled once, for the cameras, and we set off for Le Touquet in France. I climbed to 2,000 feet and wondered whether the large box on my knee, holding the maps and known as the lady’s handbag, was really suitable. I couldn’t see half the instruments, and had already turned the cameras off in its blundering on my lap.
We flew down the side of the previous weather system, black and misty to my left, clear and benign to my right. I tuned the radio into London Control, settled down, the flying was easy, and when we came to the coast, MHB grasped the bar again and did another piece to the right wing camera - I waved at the viewers - as we ‘coasted out’ (all useless gestures as the wimpy camera system has not worked so far). We avoided the danger area of Dungeness atomic station, skirted out to sea, and with the usual nerves about single-engine flight over water - there had been no room for the dinghy - I headed for Le Touquet, MHB occasionally grasping the controls and sadly confirming that some bits of his steering system weren’t working. He couldn’t fly a straight line.
MHB on tarmac at Le Touquet, 10.30am after a pee, March 7, ’07, before we spent 2 hours discovering and fixing a fault with power to the GPS. I went through some cloud to get to France, which I don’t like, but it was very quick - averaging 90 mph, amazing in a flexwing microlight - I landed in Le Touquet. I was in fast trim and we came down like a pregnant cow, though with no damage. We went through the formalities, someone there recognised me from 20 years ago and my first microlight flight to Australia, had a pee with me asking MHB not to drink- though I had to find him a sandwich - and when we wanted to set off again I found the GPS wasn’t working.
There was no fiction in my mind about the GPS. It was not a back-up for me, it was the main navigation system, and I had not had time to programme a second GPS. Indeed, I had only decided the previous evening the route I was taking, which was not Storm Smith’s route. I did not know how to work his GPS, and again, had had no time to learn.
I found the cigar plug on my GPS had collapsed through age and use, and after various trips across the tarmac, a lovely Frenchman called Jean-Jacques Dayez, of Opal Aero Services, went off and fixed the whole thing at no charge. I stewed in 3 flying suits and MHB whispered into his telephone. The aircraft looked over-crowded. Having landed at 10am English time, it was only at 12.50 we were able to get away, with only a cursory meteorology report.
The sky looked good, 2,000 foot cloudbase, and we headed down the 1914-18 Western Front, just to the south of Amiens, and taking a route further east from Paris air space than that chosen by Mr Smith. I climbed to 3,000 feet without my normal height fears, MHB was quiet in the back though always instant in response to any questions, and getting colder and colder as the afternoon progressed. We flew through a series of rain fronts. We always avoided the heaviest rain, I had the radio off anyway as I hate talking to ATCs, and hours went by. So far, I thought, so good. We’ve got away and the game has changed. Now we have to get miles of distance under our belts and see if we can restore some of the time lost.
Meanwhile, the weather started to change.
We had flown past Troyes, 180 miles from Le Touquet, and set off on the 145 miles to Macon, when I noticed the darkness to the west, where the weather was coming from. As we entered the top of the Rhone Valley, there were ominous clouds heading our way. I don’t usually mind about rain in an open microlight, the actuality of it is much less fearful than the thought of it, but our instruments, especially the radio I had borrowed, were open to the elements, and the prolonged rain did for my radio in the end. It got darker and more misty - I told MHB what was happening, but without alarming him - but he became concerned when I had to find my way over a low-flying danger area.
The first fast jet I saw looked like a grey hawk, quite close, I thought - I don’t fly with my glasses on - and it was a few seconds before I thought it was a model aircraft before realising it was the real thing. In the next two minutes, three of them tumbled by, chasing each other. I hoped they had not seen us and pulled the bar in to race out of the zone at 80 mph. There had been no way of avoiding it, but because they flew low, I flew high, 3,500 feet, just under cloud-base. I had no height fears at all. Odd, that.
It started to rain in earnest, and I contemplated alternative landing fields. All those that appeared on my GPS looked tiny, and I feared being on a small deserted field in France as night fell, with no hangar and no one to help and MHB at the mercy of the elements. The rain smeared everything, and penetrated the radio, which crackled and acted up, and then stopped working. The GPS said the ETA at Macon was 1712 hrs, and it was into a dark, misty, rainy valley that I first saw our destination. I slowed the wing down for this, my second landing, and to MHB’s obvious relief, there was no bump. We taxied around a deserted field until arriving at the control tower, where there was a light on. A cheery Frenchman called Pierre Beaulieu, who spoke good English, greeted us - MHB had been clapping me on the back at relief at being alive, I suppose - and after parking MHB in a warm room and guiding him to the toilet, Pierre and I moved aircraft around in his small hangar until there was room for our own, and we drove off to find 70 litres of petrol. Pierre was the local flying instructor, and like all French flyers, instinctively kind to flyers from other countries.
He siphoned the fuel into the microlight - I had used the whole of the spare capacity tank, and it seemed to need 40 litres to fill it - and there was some overflow from the main tank. By now it was seriously dark, we were working by the lights of Pierre’s car, and MHB was with us but perhaps on the phone. There was nothing he could do. I hope that my wallet, which I think I left there, is still there when I get back this morning.
Pierre left me the means to get to the flyer, not locking gates as he usually did, and drove us to a nearby hotel, where my lack of a credit card became evident. MHB paid for rooms, Pierre went off to his impatient wife - she was on the phone, possibly cooking dinner - and, damp and soggy, I steered MHB to his room, agreed to meet in 40 minutes, and dragged my gear into my own simple room and set everything on charge. That’s when I discovered one of my video cameras didn’t work, and I suspect the batteries - brand new but how does one go back to complain? -of not holding a charge. I also had a shower and Atkinson-stomped my dirty washing.
MHB at Macon in France, March 7, after more than 5 hours in the air – more in one day than the total hours he flew with Storm Smith. First beer of the evening. Note coca-cola in left hand; MHB has the barbarous habit of mixing beer and coke. Dinner, my first meal in 24 hours, was simple, a salad, some fish, and an apple pie, accompanied by 3 beers which did much to relieve my tensions. MHB has his own communications, all, of course, in sound - his phone speaks to him, for example, and all his emails are verbal - and we had a pleasant if impatient supper. I went straight to bed at about 10 pm, but woke at midnight with violent cramp in both legs. It’s the effect of sitting for hours in cold with the lady’s handbag on my knees. In general, however tired I was, I did not sleep well.
I know I have major problems. The radio may not work at all this morning. I have a spare, but its format is different, and I am not sure I can adapt it. Without a radio we are in difficulty. I have to get MHB safely to Cyprus and the ministrations of RMH without too much damage.
MHB told me of the central and courageous role of Joanna Conlon in the way the flight was put together, in which she acted contrary to all my experience of women and lone adventurers. Normally, if there’s a woman involved in the process of raising sponsorship, chaps like me lose, they can’t take the chance on us. It’s a subject that comes up at beery meetings of other chaps like me, the Dutch adventurer Eppo Numan, for example, first man to fly the Atlantic by microlight. Women ask rational questions to which the lone adventurer has no reply. Joanna may be different. It makes my responsibilities even more arduous.
My son James phoned on my mobile, surprised I was already in France.
I hope to be able to get away before 0900. It’s 0620 now, and I have to find a way of packing my gear and ensuring I have enough dry clothes to stay warm. It was cold yesterday, and I shivered most of the last hour into Macon.
Copyright: Brian Milton |
