Meanwhile, I took on two PPL students at the other flying school I was associated with in Coventry. I began to realize I had something there which I could really use to my advantage.
One common dilemma that professional integrated students face in the summer is getting a night rating. Flight schools close before it gets dark during the summer months. These people don't want to wait till the following winter, and nowhere else in the UK would a flying school stay open at night. But the airport itself at Coventry is a Commercial airport with freighters arriving at night. So it stayed open till 3am.
There was no reason at all that I couldn't re-open the flying school after hours, and train these guys at night until the last freighter arrived.
I could do a whole night rating in 2 nights like that. Once word got round that I was doing this, I had people from all over the country and sometimes abroad coming to me for their night ratings during the summer months. They stayed in the bed and breakfast right by the airport, and I was loving it. I found a niche market and cornered it.
One afternoon at Coventry, an event took place that created a milestone for me. I ended up flying the very same TB-10 Tobago I was taken in as a 9 year old. The one from the farm strip in the next village. The one I used to draw pictures of at school and became sentimental about. I had done a complete circle. The last time I had flown in it, I was a child. Now I was doing a bi-annual flight review in it.
Below are two pictures of me and this aircraft. One was in 1990, and the other in 2008.
Another milestone I reached around the same time was that I logged my 1000th hour. I logged it while landing a Coventry based Cessna 172 with my student, back at Leicester where I logged my first hour when I was aged 14.
Within a couple of weeks of me logging my 1000th hour, I made contact with an operator advertising trial lessons in vintage bi-planes. It was two hours down the road from where I lived. They didn't have Tiger Moths, they had Stampe's. The Stampe SV4 is the Tiger Moth's French counterpart.
I went to pay them a visit, and they were interested in taking me on as another pilot, but I was so geared up to fly their Stampe's during the rest of that summer, I fell into a bit of a trap.
First I had to add aerobatic privileges to my instructor rating, as the trial lessons they offered were aerobatic experience exercises. Then they insisted that I start out flying their Sillingsby T67 Firefly and their RF-6 Fornier before I started flying their Stampe's. That would require some training, especially on the Firefly. It was a modern military aerobatic trainer. I was also being charged for it all, and it wasn't cheap.
The video below was recorded from the cockpit mounted cameras in the Firefly during one of my training exercises.
Definitely a valuable experience, but not what I had in mind for that summer and it was certainly not helping me towards my dream of flying vintage bi-planes.
I figured it would be worth spending this money in the end, if they stuck to their promise and after training me on the Firefly, they gave me the summer season flying their Stampe's.
I bought myself a 28 year old Series III Land Rover that I found on eBay and built the rear up as a camper. I borrowed a truck from a friend to go and fetch it right the way down from Devon. I spent a few weeks out on the front drive bringing this old basket case back to life.
It was around the same time that the Ford Scorpio I had blew a head gasket, and I started buying Jaguars. Not all together, just one after the other. I always have liked traditional shaped Jags.
The video below is the Land Rover restoration project. From a vehicle destined for the scrap heap in Devon, to a camper with a military appearance.
So I used to drive the Land Rover down there with all my flying and camping gear. I would spend a couple of days a week down there flying the RF-6 Fornier on aerobatic experience exercises.
Photograph above is thanks to Colin Hollywood.
Eventually, they did start my training on the Stampe's. Below is a video from the camera mounted under the fuel tank pointing backwards.Sadly, it was right at the end of the summer. I figured the only way to get what I wanted from them was to stay on for another year and have the next summer season at it. At least then it would be a whole season.
You don't fly vintage open cockpit bi-planes in the winter, you don't often get suitable weather for it. Even if you get a calm day with clear skies, its too cold to enjoy it.
There wasn't a lot to hang around for in the winter, so I escaped for a while and went to stay in Mumbai where I have some family.
I figured I would head back to the UK in April and start checking out on the Stampe's then, thinking they would fast track it like they did when I checked out on the Firefly and RF-6 Fornier.
When I came back, we were faced with some nasty weather for the first few weeks. When the weather improved, one Stampe went offline with maintenance issues and they wouldn't use the other one for my training with them not having a spare. By the time they had a spare one again, we were into the start of the season.
I fully expected them to make me the top priority and even postpone customers until I was online. I could then help clear any backlog created because of it. However, I was made last priority and they kept cancelling my training exercises in favor of customer flights. In the end, they told me that it wasn't going to happen yet again during this season.
At this point, I just had to cut my losses and leave. All I wanted to do, was to spend the summer of 2008 flying vintage bi-planes. When I was in told in 2009 that they will try to get me ready for 2010, I'd had enough.
I still had my Land Rover so I still had the ability to spend a couple of nights a week away from home. As a final attempt to fly Tiger Moths for the rest of that season, I contacted every single operator in the country. Since the season was already at its peak, none of them needed anymore pilots.
I realized that this summer was also not going to lead to me flying vintage bi-planes, and I needed to break away from trying to search for such operators and do something I enjoyed doing at weekends. One of my favourite places to be which is quite close to home, is Stoke Golding Airfield. You can read about this unique location in the next chapter.
