Brian Milton Journalist and Adventurer | 0520 hrs March 11, 2007

Yesterday’s flying: T/0 1130 local from Forli, landing Brindisi 1630 local in rain, after one of the half dozen most difficult flights of my life.

Stats - Forli to Ancona, 127m, Ancona to Pescara, 92m, Pescara to Bari, 160, Bari to Brindisi, 70m, total 408 miles.

I was apprehensive about the bureaucracy at breakfast with the constantly upbeat and hopeful MHB, who offered to mediate between a quick-tempered me and the authorities.

Absurd security seal, one of five, defacing Flyer at
the horrible airport at Forli, in eastern Italy

But when we got a taxi to the airport, and - absurdly, considering all the electrical equipment we were carrying could be bombs - went though security - we were conveyed to Elizabeth’s office to be told we could continue our flight. But she said, only after the flight had taken off at 1015, and then the whole airport had to be shut down.

I taxied off to fill up with 70 litres, then taxied back to begin the long slow process of preparing to fly. MHB was driven up and left with me, and an excitable bloke called Max told me a dozen times, no less, that a Notam was to be issued to the whole world of aviation to close the airport, and I must go away within the allotted 15 minute slot. I said I would go within a minute of the slot opening, after which he wouldn’t see me for dust and small feathers.

I took some photos of MHB waving his white stick at the jet as it left, to illustrate his wonderful defiance the previous day, we struggled into our gear - MHB’s flying computer was working, to his great joy - and true to my word, I took off at 1131, with the official warnings against landing at airports in Italy in a microlight whinging in my ears.

MHB shows white stick waving ‘technique’ (he can’t see it, he can only hear it getting louder) to warn off a Ryannair airliner – in background – at Forli, Eastern Italy,

The weather started beautiful and thermic, so we bumped our way SE - course 120 degrees - heading down a long narrow V, us on one arm, the coastline with the Adriatic on the other, converging near Ancona. Our speed was disappointing, a headwind of 5/10 mph, and I was slightly worried about the fuel. The back tank has no way of being measured, which is absurd, and all endurance calculations were guesses. I thought we were on the limit trying for Brindisi, 408 miles away, but I was conscious of having to get MHB to Cyprus within 6 days and handing him over safely to RMH.

The scenery was quite pretty, foothills to mountains on our right, the coast strip with rolling waves to our left, and I was pleased to see the wind start to change, to establish itself eventually as a slight tailwind. MHB was happy as Larry in the back, constantly checking air-speed, track, height, against what his sound system was telling him, and if my reading didn’t match his, making arrangements in his navigation. He has no way of discovering if his wings are level, so he can get established in a turn before his system tells him about it. This causes him to oscillate over an increasing range until I set him straight again. He is very patient, and if I am less patient, it isn’t personal, and I am learning.

BM and MHB flying from Forli to Brindisi, before bad weather closed in

We came to Ancona in about an hour, and I was shocked at the huge size of the airfield. I did not want to establish radio comms with them, because my experience is, Italian ATC bullies microlights. I set off into the foothills, anxiously peering left to get as far away from the airfield as possible, and relieved to find that the aircraft lined up to take off went the other way to us. That meant peering right to see if anyone was coming in to land. No one was, and we fled safely into the hills.

There was a line of clouds across the sky, separating it from the clear north to the murky south, and when we got under those clouds, we started to motor, seeing 90-95 mph ground speed, and passing over lovely hilltop villages, much like the French bastides, houses clustered together, able to defend themselves in street fighting. When I mentioned these to MHB, he wanted to be directed to take photos. He frets that he cannot get pictures home because I am not adept enough at digital cameras, or at least, his sophisticated machine, to edit the pictures on the screen, but he takes pictures constantly when I do point the camera for him. I take pictures of him, and one or two of me, with my camera. I do look a bit weather-beaten, but that may be the effects of age as much as the weather.

By two hours into the flight I was trying to calculate - daft, as it turned out - that if we got a quick turnaround at Brindisi at the boot of Italy, we might thrash off for Corfu, but then the sky started to change again. I noticed rain clouds, and we were soon immersed, with me hiding Jay Madhvani’s little radio under the windscreen, and flying with a hand over the two GPS’s. The second GPS, a tiny Garmin 12, is dear to me because it was so simple, and I had set it on the day’s destination - Brindisi - and the bigger Skyforce 3 on each dogleg. But I was conscious that my equipment, with which I was familiar, was at least 10 years old, in the tearing hurry we had been in to make the flight possible.

The lovely Garmin 496 looked at me from the top of the dashboard like Danielle Lloyd - the Celebrity beauty queen Big Brother contestant who thought that Winston Churchill was the first black president of the United States - it was pretty but utterly useless.

I didn’t mind the rain, so long as the trade-off with speed continued, and our speed was now constantly above 80mph, but as we flew south, so the rain and cloud grew worse, surrounding us. We came abeam Pescara, which had an airfield, and I started to try and programme my radio to at least talk to Pescara ATC - a sign of alarm - when I became conscious that we should not be in the air at all in such conditions. I said this to MHB, then asked him to take control, and we were in a diving turn towards the ground by the time I had the radio on and working. MHB said later that the feedback from the radio had drowned his verbal instructions. I would not have let him control the aircraft if there was a chance of hitting anything, so I wasn’t alarmed at the turn, but by now had decided we had to bolt for the coast.

As happens - I don’t know why - when I get nervous, the inside of my visor mists up, and I had constantly to open and wipe it with a soppy glove, the better to see. We dropped from 3,500 feet to below 1,000, flew over trashy conditions to the coast, and headed south again, me trying to find Pescara airfield. No one replied to my radio calls. If they had, I would have landed there. As the information from the GPS, including airfield frequencies, was also 10 years old, it is possible the frequency had changed. I looked right once through rain and cloud and thought I saw the runway, but we were really flying, over 90 mph, and it was gone in a flash.

MHB never panicked in the back. I have had people shrieking at me to land at 500 feet just a minute after take-off in perfect conditions, just at being there - I am not that bad a pilot - but there we were in turbulence, lashing rain, poor visibility, no radio contact with anyone, and he was cool as a cucumber. I kept heading south, there was no option, and came to the conclusion that conditions were improving ever so slightly. I decided not to try again for Pescara - I saw by my GPS it was already 13 miles behind us - because I had no faith in Italian aviation services, and flew low level about 900 feet over the beaches, following the coastline.

It was, as it turned out, the right thing to do, in that we stayed alive and made progress. Rain continued to bucket down, and I had real fears that it would penetrate either GPS or radio. But we were committed. Get to Brindisi, I thought, and my pledge to Joanna Conlon still had some validity, that I would deliver Miles to Cyprus within 6 days. Weather is always weather, and I was glad she couldn’t see the risks I was taking to get MHB through. I could dismiss them later, airily, boys being boys, and you know how girls love to hear that; they claim to be much more sensible.

We continued down the coast with another dilemma facing us. The ‘spur’ of Italy has a huge lump on it, 3,500 feet high, which affects the winds. When Keith Reynolds and I flew past it in 1998 on the world flight, I was in the driving seat, and slung all over the sky for 15 minutes. MHB and I debated the choice of going around the spur, that is, following the coast, adding 60 miles to our journey, or punting across in poor visibility. I thought I could see the lump early enough to avoid it, we were both worried about having enough fuel to get to Brindisi, so we went for the direct route. By now we had made two transfers of fuel from the spare tank, playing it cautiously, only 10 minutes each time, adding - we hoped - all the fuel and not pumping it out into free air which I think we did the previous day.

I steered inland under low cloud and rain, which got worse, and we rushed over flat farmland. I noted places to land in an emergency, and turned around once to see how the wind affected me, the speed dropping from 90 to below 60, so it was a real wind. We had passed over a number of those dreadful wind farm machines, whose arms were not moving. The lump was discernable, as I had hoped, looking like the base of Scottish mountain in the gloom. I headed right towards what turned out to be a giant Italian fighter airfield, and we jinked right and left in the mist until I had us back on track and the airfield behind us. Soon, cloud lifted to 2,000 feet, we climbed and found the southern junction of the ‘spur’ and a clear run through to Bari and Brindisi.

I had had experience of both airfields. I landed at Brindisi on my flight to Australia, and had found it the most miserable of all the towns I visited on that flight. It had once been glamorous as the Imperial Airways base for land flight. In the 1930s the Hannibals, giant biplane airliners that never had an accident and used to break out the union jack above the pilot’s cockpit after he landed, ended the Europe part of the flights to India there, and passengers transferred to flying boats to begin the journey to Alexandria in Egypt. None of that was apparent in 1987 on my first visit, and, when we got there, in the 2007 visit either. Bari had been indifferent to me and Keith on our world flight, and high winds had nearly wrecked the aircraft while we argued with bored and cretinous Italian officials about a hangar for the night.

Bumbling speedily down the coast, conditions were mellow, and Bari was kind to us (we were not landing there). MHB took over for the longest spell I let him have - 15 minutes of meticulous flying - listening to his whizzy machines steer him blindly through the sky. I videoed this process, emphasising that I was hands off, and, I hope - I haven’t seen the pictures - his determined face.

We started to talk to Brindisi, 70miles from Bari, but then the rain cascaded down, serious stuff, and Brindisi - when they heard we wanted to land - didn’t want to talk to us. The closer I got, the more ATC’s voice rose, telling me I had no right to land. I insisted I had, that permissions had been given two months earlier, and what did the oaf propose anyway, that I circle until I ran out of fuel and then crash? With very bad grace, permission was given for me to land on an enormous airfield with 4 whole aircraft on it, and as it transpired, dozens of people with nothing else to do but shout at us.

I landed with a bump, warnings still echoing in my ears - I didn’t transmit the curses I threw back, almost all ending in ‘-off’ - and turned left as instructed. A vehicular ballet was conducted near the long row of buildings, I think deciding who had precedence to shout first, and then cars whizzed all over the place, surrounding us. I took off my helmet and tried to work out who was in charge; it was not immediately apparent. They didn’t know what to do first, clap us in irons or even think about our delicate aircraft in the rain.

The bureaucracy reached Indian proportions in the next four hours - it takes a microlight pilot five hours in Calcutta between entering the airport and lining up to take off - as crowds of people whirled around arguing. I was absolutely insistent that we had permission to land - Jon Cook had even given me an approvals number in England - and when they finally found that this was true, a lot of the heat went out of the debate. It was, in any case, absurd, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. We were obviously two Englishmen, one of whom happened to be blind, doing what Englishmen do, and most foreigners don’t do and wish they did.

But every piece of paper I had was examined and photo-copied, and a man’s status was determined by how many of these documents he could claim. The girls there, three of them, spoke the best English, and did translations, and were eventually our saviours. One, called Serena, actually helped! That is, she left the office with me - we needed police permission for that - while we toured the airfield looking for shelter for the Flyer, which we found in some old sheds. Then I was taken to the aircraft and left there on the open tarmac for 30 minutes, after which steam came out of my ears and I radioed ATC to ask sharply what was happening. Right then a peasant shambled out of the night and said ‘fuel?’ and when I nodded, shambled off again. I asked ATC if I could follow him, was given permission, taxied with him to the pumps and we put in 73 litres, which cost a massive 220 herberts – euros - allegedly because it was given ‘out of hours’. When I had been ‘in hours’ they wouldn’t give me fuel. An old dodge that, which I have come across all over the world.

Then I taxied off to find the shelter, manoeuvred the Flyer in within 10 minutes, and went back to fetch MHB, who had fallen asleep sitting in his chair. Serena got us a hotel - ‘very reasonable’ she said - and the hotel sent us a car.

More Italian absurdity, because on the 5 kilometre trip to its base, with us inside, crabby and exhausted, it ran out of fuel. The driver borrowed MHB’s mobile phone to call for help, 10 minutes later a lady drove out of the night in a 4x4, and we were taken to what looked like a palace - electric gates opened at the end of the driveway - but it was an empty palace.

Aside from the staff, a large family, no one else was there, and when we sat down I feared they had no food. The opening menu was spaghetti with everything. I asked for a large steak and chips - I had eaten only one bread roll for breakfast, and nothing since - just to get something substantial inside us. I need not have worried. The steaks were excellent, as were the chips, but half a dozen huge ord’oevres were also served, and three litre bottles of beer. MHB also asked for Coke. He has the barbarous habit of mixing his Coke with his beer. One of the waiters thought this was because MHB was blind, but I explained that we were Englishmen; I am getting grumpy in my old age, and deliberately didn’t mind what foreigners, especially Italians, thought of us.

He thought Storm would never have reached Macon on Day one, and would not have flown in the Rhone Valley while the Mystral was blowing. I thought he would have done the flight through the Alps, but we only learned that route by meeting Pierre at Macon, and had we landed five minutes later, Pierre would not have been there and our whole flight would have been different. I was absolutely certain that Storm would have ended that day’s flying, as would any sensible pilot, before the raging weather at Pescara.

My artist friend Anna Dickerson, fluent in Italian and with all the confidence that blond girls have being brought up in Italy, has involved herself in the battle to get the flight to continue. This is especially moving to me, as she earns so very little money, and phone calls abroad to mobiles are expensive. The police chief at the airport wanted to continue his ‘relationship’ with Anna after we were gone - Anna said, smugly - I tease her unmercifully if occasionally her charms don’t work on men - but I must find some place to take her to dinner when I return to England. The problem is, of course, that she doesn’t eat meat. How can such people survive? But they do.

The plan today is to get to Corfu, 127miles away, as quickly as possible, refuel, and punt on to somewhere near Athens. On the world flight we went to Marathon, but it had no fuel. I’d like to find fuel without a hassle. That would come to 379 miles, with not enough light left to reach Rhodes. But if the Greeks are as laid-back as I remember, we could fly to Rhodes and then on to Cyprus tomorrow.