In a small town called Romans Saint Paul in the Rhone Valley in SE France, having flown 81 miles yesterday in 55 minutes in a weight-shift microlight, touching 117 mph at times.
Glad I am to be alive.
MHB is coming to the same conclusion, though because he’s blind that’s coming out of discussion of what happened, tangling with the infamous Mystral.
Stats: T/0, 1050, landing 1145, in a 40 mph crosswind.
I ran a few minutes late yesterday because of setting the alarm at just 0500, and today I woke at 0445. We had a French breakfast - MHB has three helpings of baguette, he eats like a horse, but drinks orange juice and not coffee - and we get to the airfield at 0800 by taxi, cost 20 euros. I find my lost wallet immediately, a relief, and I discover the radio appears to work, having dried out a bit. I carry it in my pocket while I get into a flying suit and stomp off to find the Meteo.
MHB in hangar in Macon, March 8. Note Milton’s washing
hanging out to dry – it took 3 days – on right rigging. The forecaster sucks his teeth and tells me that 60 miles south, 20 miles past Lyons, the Mystral is starting, a cold north wind that allegedly makes more widows than smoking, and even birds don’t fly in it.
‘Quarante knots,’ he says, ’40 to 50 knots, and it gets worse during the day.’
As ever, I tried to weasel a way through, not quite arguing with him - I remember one Russian forecaster on my world flight was driven to extremes of irritation because I didn’t immediately accept her forecast - but I accepted this forecast, and went back to tell Miles we wouldn’t fly that day.
Then Pierre Beaulieu turned up.
‘All weather forecasters are poofters,’ he said, ‘it’s been so ever since they failed to forecast a killer storm in 1999, and now they throw their hands up at a breeze.’
He went to his computer and, 10 pieces of paper later, he had plotted me a route down past Valence, where he thought the winds would start to get dangerous. Then he said I should turn left up a steep valley and go into the high Alps! I knew about winds in mountains, and it was my turn to start sucking my teeth, but Pierre made a plausible case, and I cheered up. MHB, who lives in a world of his own, always on the phone, was up for anything, as ever. He had to place his trust in me, and if I would go, he would go, he doesn’t have the sight to see the sky I was looking at.
As it happened, the sky looked benign, and we went through the process of getting into flying suits. I wore long johns, a vest, an electric waistcoat without the electricity, and three flying suits, along with two pairs of socks. These are too warm on the ground but it does get cold up there. I helped MHB into the microlight, plugged in whatever pieces of equipment I could find, pulled him out on the tarmac, and got in myself. I suffer from ‘bootitis’, in which I have to wiggle my left boot past so much equipment that the slightest change of angle means I cannot move at all. No good if we have to get out in an emergency, so let’s make sure we don’t have one.
I only have to fly another 1,800 miles to Cyprus, after all. The main job of getting MHB to Australia is RMH’s, so long as he gives some time to his daughter to get her project ready for O-levels. I am just a jobbing pilot on this adventure.
I seem to be getting better at take-offs, she doesn’t hang around on the ground as she first did, and once in the air, conditions were benign. We climbed to 2,500 feet, and I described the landscape to MHB so he had some idea of what was happening. There were high hills to the right, woods covered just 5% of the ground but the hills were forested, and the mighty Rhone River was on our left. As Pierre advised, I followed the right side of the valley south, to find a way around the Lyons control zone, which looked busy and mythical in the distance. Pierre had given me the lat/longs of various small airfields - a lifesaver, as it turned out - and I flew past Villefranche, long tarmac, and Lyons Brindas, a pretty little grass runway, and then flew east across the valley, crossing the river and Vienne Reventin, a tarmac runway next to a factory. It was misty in the distance, but we were flying at a spanking pace, touching 100 mph. That was exhilarating, and 45 minutes went by that way.
I was looking out for our next marker when MHB remarked - his sound system tells him about speed, direction, altitude, and so on, but not whether his wings are straight - that we seemed to have a huge increase in speed. Instead of averaging 90 mph, touching 100, we were averaging 105, touching 117mph. This was less exhilarating than frightening. We rushed into the mist, the blue sky disappearing, and hills coming out of the gloom. I had never seen names whiz by so quickly on my GPS. I went through a period of about five minutes justifying the weather conditions to myself - ‘Pierre said it would get fast here but the valley is soon coming up’ - but we seemed to go faster and faster, and I suddenly had that classic thought, ‘better on the ground wishing I was in the air than in the air wishing I was on the ground.’
I was in the air wishing I was on the ground.
MHB kept asking what was happening, nice sane comments, he was even excited at our speed. I became curt in my replies. I felt we were flying into a wall of mist, and once past the next airfield, Romans, I was not certain I could find the turn-point. There had been some doubt about its actual location, and I had thought it would be obvious to see, but conditions were such I now felt I could be sucked into the valley venturi around Montpelier, further south, and spat out, or crunched, by the violent winds.
It became crucial to actually find Romans. I chased it down my GPS across wind, my speed not abating, dropping to within 500 feet of the ground, and racing over pretty undulating farmland heading for the flat valley itself. It was only when I was within half a mile of the field that I saw it, long, wide, grassy, better than being wiped off the tarmac like a lump of strawberry jam as some American poet put it in the death of the ball-turret gunner. It’s odd what thoughts occur in such situations.
I told MHB I could see the airfield, told him it was a 40 mph crosswind, fingered the electric trim to slow the aircraft down while breathlessly hanging on to the control bar for a racing fighter turn into the wind - my last sight of my groundspeed on the GPS was still 110 mph - and lined up to land. I was expecting to get thrashed on the way in, the wind curling over the low buildings and trees to my left, but somehow that didn’t happen, and we were down, racing over the ground - more ‘bootitis’, not quite in control of the accelerator in the tight confines of my feet - but then I braked, skidded left, taxied along the deserted buildings and found some shelter behind trees on a soggy part of the field.
Brian clearly relieved, with Miles and Flyer sheltering behind trees
from the Mystral after landing at Romans in the Rhone Valley When I got out, it looked like a normal day with a flying wind. It was only to the south, about 200 yards away, that I watched two teenagers with a parawing soar it into the sky and start making leaps of 10 to 15 feet into the roaring air. I walked out into the middle of the airfield and felt again that scary wind, and was thankful in that quiet way it happens, to be alive.
Throughout the rest of the day, Miles questioned me to find out the full extent of what had happened. He has said three times that he wishes the duff video was working so he could show other people what he is going through. I replied that he can explore all those experiences with the more technically accomplished RMH. I’d rather we had a peaceful life.
Rearranging GA aircraft at Romans to house the Flyer. I headed off to what looked like a restaurant at the north end of the field, discovered it was full of lunching Frenchmen, went back to guide MHB there – his nose twitched, he likes his food - and we followed his nose through the door and a respectfully offered table. There MHB tucked into a pizza, and I looked for a safe place for the microlight, always my first concern. I can imagine how RMH would say - Plonker! - if I phoned to say I had dinked it. Distant view of the Mystral to the south of Romans in the
Rhone Valley before Flyer is safely housed. The local Romans flying club was a few steps away, with three middle-aged people poring over paperwork, two men, one called Fred, and a woman - Madame President of the club - and they were kindness personified. Fred offered me the club hangar - he’s the incoming club president in 10 days time - and a lift to a nearby hotel, and later, a lift back to the airfield in the morning. I drove the aircraft to the hangar, we shifted the four GA aircraft already there, I went back to eat most of a pizza - MHB ate the remainder - and we unpacked our luggage. I left my wet laundry, socks and shreddies and a shirt - to dry on the aircraft rigging, along with our flying suits. It was out of the wind, but surely dry enough to work (it wasn’t).
The kind incoming chairman of Romans Flying Club, Fred
– with washing – before driving MHB and BM to a good hotel Both MHB and I were weary. It had been a difficult few days, much worse for him, keeping faith with his dream, than for me. He lives in a permanent world of blackness, forever dependent on the rest of us for small things, yet aspiring to adventures that many sighted people would shy away from.
Fred dropped us at a nearby hotel - Hotel Karene - where we were greeted by a pretty woman, six months pregnant, and allocated rooms. MHB wanted to sleep for three hours, and I wanted to get all my navigation points into a separate simple GPS, and have some reserves in case more things went wrong. The single slender lead between my GPS and the aircraft power supply was the only link between us and getting lost. I needed at least 2 such leads. MHB, meanwhile, asked for sweeties, lots of sweeties, while I went out to look for batteries for the big GPS, and I found all we needed in a big supermarket nearby. Then I slept too for 70 minutes, had a bath, delivered the sweeties - MHB now wanted lots of bottles of coke, which I fetched - and then I did all my computer work.
It looks like we have 1,707 miles to go to get to Pafos in western Cyprus, including about 700 miles over water. I can hear the teeth-sucking from GA pilots at this news, but Amy Johnson did it without a GPS. That was back in the heroic days of GA flying; we in microlighting are still living in such days.
MHB is having problems with his flying equipment, and with other technical bits. I reset his video camera on charge, and checked my own equipment, finding my video camera now works. I must use it today. MHB wants to have all my turn-points in his own system, but his new keyboard isn’t in Braille, and he wants me to put them in. I persuaded him that this can all be done in Cyprus, irritated that Storm had not done this before the flight started.
A hundred miles of map is missing. From then on, I have the right maps, but they are not marked. It is as if he got to the bottom of Italy and, appalled at the prospect of so much flying to come, hundreds of miles of it over water, had just given up.
This was the theme of the dinner we had at the local Tex-Mex, great kind service but indifferent food. I talked to RMH in England by phone - a mobile is a revelation to me, though I hate the way it can dictate one’s life - and he, too, was raging at what he had found.
To say that was found wanting is a terrific understatement.
The personal edge to my fury came from the thought that the few of us who go for adventures need people like Standard Chartered, and to realise that one of our number had so betrayed the unwritten covenant between sponsor and adventurer was galling. I wanted to assure Joanna Conlon, the link between us and SCB that almost all of us were not like Storm Smith. Both Paul Loach of GT Global, and Terry Pryce of Dalgety, who had sponsored me in the past, had a secret knowledge that I was going to come back from the adventure they had backed, with my shield, as Paul put it, or on it. Keith Reynolds had at least got halfway around the world on our world flight before blowing it. Storm Smith had not even started!
MHB told me it was the second time this had happened, but after the first time Storm had been so plausible about why he had given up that MHB had believed him.
‘Please don’t believe him a third time,’ I pleaded.
There was a red sky last night. I will, of course, get a better forecast than this, but the old-fashioned forecast was re-assuring.
I am reading Charles Miller’s ‘The Lunatic Express’ in the down-time days I knew we would have, and it is perfect. Those wonderful Victorian explorers in Africa, who got by and survived hostile tribes on stoicism and bluff, give me great heart.
I know I am just a temporary part of MHB’s noble feat, but I delight in returning to the atmosphere that has dominated parts of my life. Today I have to find a way through the high Alps to the Mediterranean coast, to get into Italy with all my paperwork attached, and to race for the Adriatic coast.
Will we make it?
Will events conspire to stop us?
Storm’s lunatic timetable has got in the way.
How did he expect to get to Amman in Jordan in 6 days, for example, with a blind man as a co-pilot, when Keith Reynolds and I took 8 days, flying every day, to make the same journey? Keith and I aspired, however temporarily in Keith’s case, to the greatest feat in microlighting, the first world flight in a tiny flexwing. We could swap about, me flying one day, he the next, so I had no responsibility for crossing the Alps (to my relief).
Storm could not do that with MHB, yet that was his judgement.
An embarrassment.
Copyright: Brian Milton |
