Brian Milton Journalist and Adventurer | 0426 hrs March 12, 2007

In the Hotel Bretagne in Corfu after a frustrating day, but at last we have got out of the grasp of the Italians.

Stats: T/0 Brindisi, 1200Z, landing Corfu 1400Z, after a flight of 128 miles, but there was a time change so another hour was lost. As a result, we could not fly on to Athens, and the whole nature of the event has changed. It looks like the end of the adventure for me, because RMH is out here today or tomorrow, and I am back home again.

MHB and BM + three Italian ground staff
in Brindisi before flying to Corfu

We had a lovely breakfast in the Hotel Masseria Marziale, and did not run out of fuel going back to the airport. Now there was no question of us being there illegally, but just because of the usual paper hassles, a lot of the passion to stop us has gone, though not all. A new woman was in the control centre, and at first she seemed to think there would be no problems. But when I went to file a flight plan, all the old Italian gifts for bloody-minded interfering came up, and I was told I could not leave that day, and I should return the following day to see what happened.

I am afraid I am known to occasionally throw wobblies, though as wobblies go, this was quite a mild one. I said King Abdullah of Jordan - in fact it’s his wife - was waiting for us in Amman on Tuesday, and I looked forward to telling him it was because of Italy that we wouldn’t be there. This must have had some potency. I heard later that day that my friend Jay Madhvani, the instructor at the St Albans airfield from which I normally fly, had landed at Brindisi on his own race to Cyprus, and had been detained five days. I can imagine how they played with him. I stomped around the ATC office looking thunderous, and after a while I heard that - unheard of on a Sunday morning - the Director of the Airport was considering our case.

Here’s this huge airport with only four aircraft on it and hundreds of staff all standing around with hours of time to crack jokes and spray each other with perfume, and their only job appeared to be to hold up two honest travellers on spurious grounds.

In the end, I wrote out a flight plan - I am really rusty at that - and leaving the time of departure to God and the Airport Director, went back to tell MHB the bad news. He falls into a state of trance at such moments, often murmuring to someone on the phone. I pulled out ‘The Lunatic Express’ and sat down to read.

I asked the new girl whether I could get my aircraft out of the storehouse where we had struggled to put it the previous evening - heaving on the nose with a full fuel load is exhausting - but she said I couldn’t.

Miles wanted a pee. I escorted him along to the lavatory, hung around, escorted him back, and the new girl - I never asked her name - said quietly that we could go. We hustled out as quickly as we could and were driven to the hangar, where I soon had the aircraft out on the windy tarmac and began the process - it takes an average of an hour - to get us into it. A small crowd hung around, laughing and joking - what do they do for a living? - but they were full of friendliness. I wanted to get to Kerkira - the local name for Corfu - re-fuel and fly on, so I was glad to be able to taxi out at 1030. Our radio was working perfectly at the time, then it suddenly stopped doing so. When I asked for permission to take off, there was just a loud buzz back. In despair, I taxied off the runway, waved at the van full of spectators, told them the problem, and taxied back to where we had been. I couldn’t set off across 128 miles of sea to another country with a duff radio. Something similar had happened to Keith Reynolds and I on the world flight but we had discovered it 30 miles out to sea, and by then wild horses would not have driven us back to Italy to repair it.

This time I had responsibility for MHB. I got out, helped MHB out - he could do nothing to help, so went back to his phone trance - and I started to tear the aircraft apart, dumping our luggage and trying not to be bad tempered. Had Storm not taken his radio, this would not have been happening. For the dozenth time on this flight, I said a few harsh words to the ether about him. Engineers were summoned. We checked the link between the radio and the aerial. It worked. I checked all the radio connections. They also worked. I tried calling Brindisi Tower. They replied! But I had lost confidence in the radio. I had a spare, an Icom A-20 with which I had flown around the world. The occasionally working radio was a later model, an A-22 - which I had never liked - but to change them over, I also had to change the configuration of the Lynx link between the radio and our earphones. When I tried to open the Lynx box in the torn-open remains of the aircraft, it was like trying to enter a tiny Fort Knox. No known Allen key fitted it. I chomped with frustration.

Eventually, yet another engineer was found, and he discovered the right key to open to box, which I did, surrounded by excited Italians offering advice and posing for photos with MHB, who is diligent in getting photographic evidence of his deeds. I looked dubiously at the 8 changes I had to make to tiny switches, made those changes, tested them with the box opened, and they worked!

It was another laborious process putting everything back together, checking nothing was hanging off, and all the time fearing that yet another Italian bureaucrat will discover some obscure regulation from Brussels to further delay us. I was not in the best of tempers when I finally installed MHB in the back, climbed in, was pushed back by our spectators, got the engine running, and was finally mollified by the way the radio worked perfectly. MHB was, as ever, upbeat.

We got away to the usual long run over the tarmac - for a microlight - climbed and set off over 128 miles of sea. We had no dinghies - it is only the energy of RMH back in England that has secured a way of mounting a dinghy on the aircraft - so it was our risk to live with the botched job done by Mr Smith, and RMH will make his own much better arrangements when he takes the aircraft over. MHB asked mildly if one of the emergency locator beacons - ELBs - could be attached to him, which I did, trusting my own life to the out of date ELB from the world flight.

I looked over the Adriatic Sea, ships at anchor, ships plying between the world and Albania to our left. There could hardly have been more favourable weather, as a following wind developed - it may have just been no head wind - and we motored along at 80 mph. MHB took the controls again and made a reasonable job of steering in a straight line, while I videoed him. He sits lower in the back of the trike than I do, for some reason, and I had to adjust camera angles to get - I hope - his determined face, alive with concentration.

MHB takes the controls whenever asked, and often asking himself, and he flew, to begin with, a straight line. I understand he has buttons to ask 20 different questions - speed, height, direction, air speed, ground speed, and lots more in a cacophony of sound - but he doesn’t have one that tells him if his wings are level. This means that when he wanders off course, the delay in reading the compass causes him to over-correct, and he goes into a series of oscillations that increase in range and tempo. I can hear him consciously compensating for this, and he does improve, but like pilots permanently in cloud with no specialised instruments, he is in constant danger of losing equilibrium. MHB is a classical stoic - in the air - and never loses his determination.

He dreams, out loud, of what he will do when he can level his wings, like a thirsty man dreaming of water.

Passing a Greek island NW of Corfu at 3,500 feet

The radio was a joy, able to pick up Brindisi when we were 60 miles away, and also when we joined Kerkira Control. Albania loomed out of the mist to the left, still mysterious, with enormous cliffs and mountains, and then two small islands - each inhabited, perhaps by rich men - before we found Corfu itself. It looked quite different from Italy, despite being separated by just 120 miles. The colour of the land was yellow, and the architecture was more anarchic. The southern Italy we had left had lots of straight lines dividing one property from another.

We flew over the thermally centre of the island at 3,500 feet followed by a steep descent to a left hand circuit on runway 12, facing 120 degrees.

Coming to Corfu at 3,500 feet in early afternoon.
Note video camera tucked under windscreen.

The welcome could not have been more different than the way we had been greeted in Italy. People were friendly, no one warned us of anything, all requests were considered and then granted.

Flyer tucked into fire truck space at Corfu and safely tied down. Keith Reynolds and I had parked in virtually the same place 9 years earlier on the first microlight flight around the world.

Paris Nikoloulis, the young ATC officer who helped us through the formalities, had all sorts of concerns about the fragility of our aircraft that was balm to my injured soul. The fact that he cared was enough. We were able to get the Flyer out of the wind and into what may have been the same fire engine shed slot KR and I had used 10 years earlier.

But I was still weary. There is no genuine concern in countries like Italy with the safety of pilots. It is just a mad concern for regulations, and if they kill us, then perhaps a regulation can be amended, when it is the way such regulations are administered that does the killing. Greece was lovely.

I am not sure where to go today. Because of the Italian delays, I cannot get through to Cyprus in enough time to keep MHB on schedule, and the changeover of pilots is due. The weather forecast for the Athens area is daunting, Force 7 winds from the NE, 40 mph directly across our course with ‘moderate turbulence’, not brilliant news for a little microlight.

I plan to follow the coast to the mouth of the Corinth Canal, and then head directly east, staying out at sea most of the time to avoid being thrashed by thermals. I have the procedural way to get into Athens International; let’s hope I can interpret it without harassing ATC there.

MHB and I dined on pizza last night. Astonishingly, given his appetite, he only ate half the pizza, but that’s because he is fighting to keep the integrity of this flight.

I just want to ensure RMH takes the Flyer - and MHB - in reasonable condition, and then find my own way home. Meanwhile, postcards call, to my son James, to Anna Dickerson and Stephen Lewis, to Julian Parr and Moira Thomson - I would be dead-headed by those two if I failed to record my adventures by postie - and to Helen Dudley, who has had such cards for the past 10 years.