First Solo – 44 Years On..

Through planning or good fortune, I have generally flown on the anniversary of that first flight. On the 25th anniversary, I organised to fly a light aircraft in Queensland where I was on holidays. 40 years on, and unaware of the date, I flew an S&P check in a Diamond DA40 at RAAF Richmond. This year, 44 years had me earthbound, although  my eyes were still scanning overhead.

Teasingly, our home lies under busy commercial flight paths, albeit with the aircraft at altitude. Lower down, light aircraft criss-cross the sky as the Toll helicopter makes regular sorties to and from the local hospital. Today, a formation of naval training helicopters had me neck craning and my eyes looking skyward.

As a boy, I would clamber up a rickety paling fence, step across to our water tank before levering myself atop our shed. There I would sit on the ridge cap with my dad’s binoculars, focusing on aircraft large and small – every moment I was foolishly wishing my life away so that I may be seated in the cockpit rather than on a sloping tiled roof. I have been fortunate that in the intervening years, aviation has shown me its many faces – high and low and across the globe.

As I contemplate the future, with retirement looming, I often reflect on the past 44 years and even beyond, when my father first took me into the sky. I consider how fortunate that I am to still fly, as surgery threatened to permanently ground me only three years ago. 

Strangely, in an environment that some folks fear and a place that demands the utmost concentration and discipline for aviators, I am strangely relaxed – like a second home. And when I am not aloft and surveying the ground and oceans below, I am yearning to return to the sky. Pink Floyd once used the phrase “earthbound misfit” in one of their songs. Perhaps they were describing folks like me.