slapping. He went from being a student pilot to a swaggering, Baron owning, Chairman of the Flying Club in the blink of an eye. Don was a bright guy with a magnetic personality but was always in a hurry and vastly overconfident around aeroplanes.
preflight. He makes a dive for the pitot, then slowly comes up, all red in the face. He’s holding the matchstick in front of him.
The secret book that tells us how to be good instructors has a special section on how to deal with this sort of personality. Basically you set them difficult targets, and when they fail to meet these goals you use criticism as a pin to pop their ego bubbles. However, Don’s outer covering was one that many rhinos would have envied. Even a well-honed sword had difficulty getting through.
“But that’s bloody dangerous.”
In a desperate bid to get him to slow down and do things properly, I did something very naughty – I shoved a match into the Baron’s pitot head before we flew, and awaited developments. As expected he didn’t spot it on the preflight. Even worse, he didn’t spot the lack of indicated airspeed during takeoff until the wheels left the ground. Suddenly he yelped, “Christ, we’ve got no airspeed.”
“Jim, did you do this?” “Yes, I did, Don.”
“You are quite right – so you had better make sure it never happens to you again.” Later, he had the good sense to tell the story, against himself, in the pub. As I said, Don was a bright guy and this event wasn’t wasted. It slowed him right down and he immediately became a far safer pilot.
a dr eadf ul litt le Er coupe , ZS-BOJ
“We have plenty of airspeed, Don, we just don’t know what it is.” Don was one of these big, swarthy guys who is almost bald but makes up for it by having hairy hands and a young forest billowing out of his shirt front, which always had a couple of buttons undone to reveal a heavy gold chain nestling amongst the vegetation. Such people are inclined to sweat for almost no reason. It’s disgusting, it runs down their faces, gets in their eyes and drips off their chins. Don excels in this activity as I bully him round the circuit. Once we are back on the ground he is bursting with righteous outrage. He blames the aeroplane, the maintenance guys and the insects that had the gall to block his pipe. I ask why he didn’t spot the problem during the
That weekend we had a flyin at the old abandoned Port Alfred airfield. And this planted the seed in my turnip for the start of 43, but that’s another story.
It was a wonderful event – people turned up from miles around in all sorts of splendid aeroplanes – many of which would fetch a lot of money today, but were seen as poor man’s puddle jumpers in those days. There was a Fairchild and the Ercoupe and a Stinson Voyager, a couple of Chippies and Tigers and Cubs as well as a flock of 150s, 172s and Cherokees. We had the normal spot landing and forced landing competitions, as well as some flour bombing fun, but by far the most entertaining was the streamer cutting competition. For those who haven’t tried it, here’s how it works. You arm yourself with three bog-rolls and carefully insert paper clips on either side to hold the inner layer to the cardboard tube. This will act as a weight to keep the paper descending vertically. If you don’t do this the roll just becomes a nasty squiggly mess – like a kitten amongst the knitting. Don’t try to economize with single-ply paper – it turns into confetti the moment you eject it into the slipstream, or worse September 2021
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