I was still at the flying club on the weekends providing the fire covers and earning a little bit of flying credit like that, then going off once in a while to fly the Cessna Aerobat for half an hour. To build 40 hours that way would have taken a heck of a long time though. Paying the full hourly rate would have put me out of pocket. The solution was another one of those things that just fell into place.
One afternoon, a Tiger Moth just turned up at Leicester. The pilot said he was just delivering it for a company called Avia Special. Avia was going to operate out of there during the summer months and sell vouchers for introductory lessons. It was being used as a novelty birthday treat kind of thing. Trial lesson in a vintage open cockpit Tiger Moth. These vouchers were being sold in the supermarkets and online.
When Avia started searching for ground crew, I was almost nominated. I don't ever remember volunteering and I really can't remember how it all happened, but somehow I ended up being the main ground crew person. Meeting and greeting the customers, strapping them in the front cockpit and hand starting the engine. It became a weekend job around the fire cover shifts and the tower shifts.
I certainly enjoyed working with an aeroplane that I was so fond of from since I was a child at the farm strip, but boy did I get frustrated watching someone else fly it all day. I knew that I was still a long way off being qualified as a European JAA Instructor and with relevant tail wheel experience to be able to work as a pilot on an operation like that.
Photograph above is thanks to Mark Kopczewski.
Once in a while, the Tiger Moth would spend a day or two operating out of another airfield elsewhere because there were enough vouchers sold in that area to make it a worthwhile day out. Whenever that happened, it needed to be ferried. So that was when I got the chance to go along in it. I flew it from the front cockpit. The pilot in the rear was always an instructor, so I could log dual time. I wasn't really learning how to fly it by just having control in the cruise, but after a while I did start to take off and land as well. So very gradually, I was being converted onto it.The opportunities were too rare, and although I appreciated every minute of every chance I got to fly it, I knew that I really did need to be where the instructor was. I started to have a burning desire to fly Tiger Moth's at this point, and working as a Tiger Moth trial lesson / joy ride pilot at some point along my career path was high on the priority list of things for me to do.
One day, we flew it from Leicester to Northampton. It was going to operate there for a day and had around 8 customers to fly. The building I was given an office to meet and greet the customers in was a maintenance hanger. This was a case of stumbling into the right place at the right time. The engineer of that maintenance hangar ran a small flying group. It was called the RB group after the registration of the flagship aircraft G-AJRB. The flagship was a 1946 Auster. They had a couple of other aircraft as well such as a Cessna 172 and a Piper Cherokee, but the Auster captured my interest straight away.
The way that group worked was to have around 30 members that paid into it monthly. It wasn't an extortionate amount, but coming from 30 people meant that there was enough money in the pot. So that then made it possible to let those members fly the aircraft on just a little bit more than the cost of the fuel.
Well I practically joined on the spot. Not only did this group mean that I could afford to fly every weekend, it meant that I got to fly a vintage tail wheel aircraft that gave me the same kind of enjoyment as flying the Tiger Moth. It wasn't open cockpit, although you could slide the windows all the way open in the summer. It had that same kind of upside down mounted inline 4 cylinder engine that had a unique vintage sound of its own, and created that smell of oil and fuel in the cockpit which adds to the nostalgia. Taking that out on a summer evening was a real privilege. I was checked out and signed off in it within a day. Fortunately, most of the other members in the group were more interested in the Cessna and the Piper. There were only a very small handful of us that flew the Auster. So it was handled carefully and well looked after. It was also not difficult to get hold of as we weren’t exactly fighting for it all at the same time. I took it everywhere. I went to fly-ins, I flew formation with Avia’s Tiger Moth from Leicester. I even took it to the Channel Islands once, and won an award.
The photograph below was taken by my dad when I flew over our house with an old school friend. It was her 21st birthday and I gave her a ride.
During the summer months, I took it camping on Leicestershire Aeroclub fly-outs. Myself and a few other members would take tents in the back of the plane. We would fly to places where we could enjoy a bbq in the evenings.
Then we would pitch our tents by the aircraft, go play Frisby over the grass strip and knock back a few drinks.
The photograph below was on the flight line at Shuttleworth, Old Warden. This wasn't a Leicestershire Aeroclub fly-out, this was myself and a friend of mine that flew into the show. They let me park the Auster with the display aircraft and camp with it over night on the flight line.
For a good 18 months, I had some really good quality enjoyable flying in the Auster especially on those calm summer evenings with the windows open, over the fields and the lakes. It's slow, graceful and has a unique sound all of its own.
It's a kind of flying that you just can't do with modern aircraft. Flying the Auster, I had accumulated those 40 hours that I needed for the FAA commercial license, and a lot more.
During the winter, I entered it into the flour bombing competition at Leicester. I flew over the target at 100 feet in the middle of the field, and my bomber in the right hand seat threw a bag of flour out of the window to try and hit the target. This was hilarious fun. With all the participants, the competition lasts all day, and the safest place for the judges to stand is by the target. Everywhere else except for the target is showered with bags of flour falling from the sky.
New Years Eve that year, myself and a few others from Leicester went flying in Cessna's and Pipers across midnight. There is no way to describe how amazing that is. A camera couldn't capture the effect. What happens on the stroke of midnight is someone at least in every street, sets off fireworks all on the same minute. From 3000 feet at night, you can see for miles around. So you are literally looking down at 1000s of firework displays as far as you can see. The whole earth sparkles.
After that, I left my job in security. I had studied for the commercial and the site was closing down. So it was definitely time for me to go back to the States and get the FAA commercial pilots certificate. So that's what I did, I went back out to Naples to get it.
Most of the requirements for the commercial license apart from 3 more hours on a complex aircraft, I had filled already. So I trained to standard, learned the manoeuvres: Eights on Pylons, Chandelles, Lazy 8s. I took the test and passed, then went to the beach.
