Guy Leitch

In July I wrote a 1000 word op-ed for the general media  (Why is the CAA grounding planes)  on the CAA’s resurrection of the idiotic 12 year rule. In it I felt I had to note that general aviation is not just a hobby for the rich.

I said, “General aviation may be perceived by some as a rich “weekend warrior” hobby – but the industry is far bigger than that. It trains airline pilots, its enables food security by crop spraying, it fights forest fires, it provides life-or-death helicopter rescue – the list is endless.”

I felt I needed to say this partly because a somewhat jaded pilot friend of mine once said that; ‘General Aviation is a solution – looking for a problem.’

So why do we fly?

A while ago I had a minor epiphany about flying – it gives us the freedom to move vertically.

The ability to move readily in three dimensions is extraordinarily rare – being limited almost exclusively to flying and scuba diving. Personally I prefer the freedom that flying gives, as scuba diving is wet, cold and claustrophobic. But then I’m biased.

Too many people set themselves the goal of getting a private pilot’s licence, but then once they have it, they lose interest. They get tired of pounding around the circuit or going for ‘$100 hamburgers’.

A while ago I was strolling down the main road in Kalk Bay looking forward to a large vanilla ice cream with a Flake in a chocolate cone. I bumped into a chap who had given me a lapel badge that said, ‘Live Vertically’. I asked him what he meant by living vertically.

He said the problem with living on Earth is that we are essentially living our lives in two dimensions. We can go forward and back, and left and right. But we seldom if ever take the time to stop and drill down to experience the richness of life.

He shared how he had taken a road trip of just a hundred kilometres to Greyton. He did not just get in his car and drive there, he took the time to explore as many of the side roads as he could. The experiences he gained are much deeper and thus richer, than those who simply get in and go, with a destination fixation.

He pointed out the obvious; if you unpack or unravel the experience lines of having lived vertically, they add up to far more than the linear existences of those who hurry from one immediate goal or destination to the next.

I thought somewhat guiltily about my own infrequent driving between Hoedspruit to Joburg, where getting to the destination as fast as possible is the over-riding objective.

On a trip down to the Cape, Jim Davis reproached me for pushing from Grahamstown to Kalk Bay instead of taking the time to explore all the little airports and flight schools and aviation businesses along the way. (My excuse was that it was a Saturday and no–one was at work.)

Anyway, back to my pavement conversation with Mr Living Vertically. He had owned a restaurant and he had painted a couple of slogans on the walls. The one that had made an impression was: ‘Live purposefully’.

I pressed him to explain more about what he meant by ‘purposeful living’. As he warmed to his subject, I noticed the glint of the proselytiser in his gaze. I nodded my head and said that was why I was so sold on flying. It’s something that has to be done deliberately and consciously, with all our wits about us. If we do not bring this mindset to flying, it will turn and bite us. As the well-known poster says, ‘Flying is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect’.

Flying is demanding. It demands that we do it properly, without shortcuts, with a properly maintained and checked aircraft. It requires discipline and commitment.

Commitment especially is required to deal with the seemingly endless bureaucratic obstacles that the regulator,  the “Commission Against Aviation” puts in the way of the simple linear enjoyment of our aircraft. And yes, it costs a lot compared to living passively by watching sport on TV.

So why do we do it? The big reward is that it enables us to move freely, for thousands of feet, in the vertical. I glibly said that as a pilot I was already able to experience the freedom of living vertically, and I moved on to get my ice cream.

And then I had my minor epiphany as I realised the problem with flying.

I might like to think that it gives us freedom in three dimensions – but does it really?

I realised that the problem with my flying is that I mess up the vertical freedoms we tend to take for granted. Just as I get in the car and hammer it down the road, ignoring the vast richness of the landscape, so with flying, even more do we insensately pass over the myriad experiences that are to be had on the ground.

When flying in the flight levels we sit in our noisy cocooned boxes, cut-off from the experience of the landscape below us. The three dimensional part of flying is reduced to the minor irritation of descent planning, which I discovered my old Garmin 430 can do effortlessly anyway.

We cannot stop and take in the sights, the sounds and especially the smells. It is the smells that give me my biggest experiences. I remember the fragrance of the veld after rain, the fecundity of the forests and the first sniff of the saltiness of the ocean. These are all lost to us as pilots.

It may be a hangover from flying navigation rallies, but even when I’m driving I take what now seems to me a perverse and somewhat childish pleasure in calculating ETAs. What’s the point? The journey’s the thing. If I had any sense I would fly as low and as slow as possible, going round the mountains and up and down the valleys, rather than flying obliviously over the top. Maybe that’s why slow high-wing ‘backcountry planes’ have become so popular.

I used to sneer at those who fly slow planes. But now, thanks to this epiphany, suddenly I understand why people still fly Piper Cubs with the doors open. And now I understand why people pay so much money and make so much noise to fly choppers. The ability to just land anywhere to explore the countryside is priceless. Up to now I used to think of helicopter pilots as conspicuous consumers who flaunted their money by clattering along at an entirely unnecessary low level, kicking up dust and noise wherever they land, be it serene wine farms or remote mountain tops. Now I envy them their freedom.

Then there is another class of pilots who really enjoy the three dimensions. It’s those who fly aerobatics. The thrill of powering upwards and then the stomach-turning swoop downwards with the hard earth rushing up to meet you is a direct face-to-face confrontation with living vertically.

No wonder putting the maximum power in the lightest aircraft is such a passionate ideal. These are the pilots who really do know about living vertically, even if it is a bit hectic for those of us who prefer the exquisite tension of gliding. (But then I enjoy the almost timeless existentialism of five day cricket, punctuated as it is by the frisson of each ball bowled.)

So as the sign on the wall says – Live Purposefully. As pilots we need to make the mental gear change to celebrate to the utmost the privilege and freedom which the fantastic invention of flight has given us. Go and explore places. Fly low and slow, or go and play amongst the clouds.

The hectic and at times helter skelter rush of flying is about the journey, not the destination.