Born To Fly Page 20

  All the same, the last thing a pilot wants to hear is the engine cough, especially when your plane is flying over a body of water such as the English Channel. You have to be in a plane a few thousand feet in the air and over the sea to really understand what it feels like when a smooth-running engine misses a beat. However, with information gleaned from various aircraft engineers in the back of my mind I decided to keep tracking towards France.

  As I climbed over the Channel I looked back over my left shoulder and took one long last look at the White Cliffs of Dover and the UK itself. I could already see land ahead of me and wished all water crossings were like this. Directly off the nose was France and to the left were Belgium and the Netherlands. I couldn’t believe how many countries were within reach with the fuel I had on board.

  Even though the Channel was hardly vast in comparison to the bodies of water I had seen from the Cirrus since leaving Australia, I sat there thinking about the people who had attempted to swim across it. As someone better equipped to float than swim, I was happy to be above the water rather than in it.

  The French coastline zipped under the nose just before I climbed from 9000 feet to 12,000 feet – and for a very good reason. I had been told of a few hills known as the French Alps along my flight path, and I knew they were rather large. A high cover of cloud sat only a few thousand feet below me, yet off the left wing was a snow-capped peak poking through the cloud. I immediately thought of the cartoon where a pilot suddenly sees a mountain goat in his windscreen even though he is flying quite high. This was true mountain goat in the windscreen territory.

  Ken and I had discussed the flight through the French Alps when we were sitting around the kitchen table at home. The Cirrus could fly only so high. As it climbed the amount of oxygen in the air reduced and oxygen, along with fuel, was what fed the hungry engine. As the oxygen reduced so did the performance of the plane. This would continue until the Cirrus could simply climb no more, it would more or less run out of breath. The French Alps in places exceeded the height to which the aircraft could climb. This situation would lead to a ‘mountain goat strike’ and the end of Teen World Flight.

  The solution was to choose a path through the French Alps, to fly along the valleys and the lowest-lying land. The map was covered in airways or roads in the sky. Each airway had a lowest safe altitude; if flying within cloud it was necessary to stay above this altitude at all times to ensure you remained clear of terrain. Ken and I had planned a route that carefully zigzagged through the Alps, staying at 12,000 feet for the entire flight.

  Sitting comfortably at 12,000 feet and breathing with the aid of my oxygen cannula, I peered through the clouds at the largest mountains I had ever seen in my life. At one point the lowest safe altitude just nearby was a whopping 17,600 feet! After a while the mountainous terrain started to drop away as the coastline neared and looking back it was hard to comprehend just what I had been flying over.

  Since crossing the coast I had been overrun with French, not just the accent but also the language itself. Nearly every pilot apart from me was speaking to the air traffic controllers in French, and vice versa. This felt odd. Normally I could listen out to other aircraft and gain a little knowledge about who was doing what and where. Not now.

  I was given permission to descend into the French Riviera. The coast was in sight and it looked absolutely beautiful. I was doing okay with the French accent so far although I had to listen carefully as the controllers spoke so quickly. They cleared me for an approach that took me out over the water, where I would turn and track back towards the coast. I watched as my destination, Cannes, zipped under the left wing and back behind the aircraft. I was switched across to the control tower and told the controller that I was visual with the airport and requested to track visually for a landing. She had no idea what I meant.

  I continued over water until I was fifteen nautical miles off the coast and wondering whether I should have just filled up the ferry tank a little more and kept on going. With a crackle of the radio I was told to turn back and so I pointed towards the airport, being told where to track and how to join the airspace just over the runway. This time I had no idea what the controller was saying. I couldn’t understand her accent and I had to listen hard just to work out whether she was speaking French or English.

  For the next ten minutes my favourite phrase became ‘Please say again’. The French controller was getting quite irritated, yet every moment we struggled to communicate was another moment closer to arriving over the airport. We spoke back and forth, each time a little more slowly and with a slightly more ‘refined’ rounding of the vowels. It didn’t really help. For the first time during the flight I became quite irritated myself, though I made sure my finger was away from the radio transmit button before expressing exactly what I was thinking about the situation. No translator would have been needed and I thought I had better warn 60 Minutes about that particular piece of footage. Finally we understood each other, and with our little conversation nearly over I began my descent and turned to line up with the runway.

  For a moment I thought I had landed in paradise. I was directed by the control tower to a parking spot in front of the very official and fancy terminal and carefully navigated through the fleet of jets owned by the rich and famous. Wow. I really get to park here? I thought. But my joy was short-lived. I was told, ‘There is a newspaper here that would like to have a photo with you and the aircraft, and once you are done we will move you to the other side of the airport.’

  After shutting down, stretching the legs and doing a quick newspaper interview complete with translator and confused though smiling French reporter, I taxied across to a grass parking spot, much more as I had expected. I closed up the aircraft and packed my bags into a van. We stopped by another aircraft and picked up a pilot and his wife. I said hello and attempted to start a conversation but received only blank looks and an awkward smiling nod. Oh right, I thought, no one spoke English.

  It had been an okay flight and the biggest issue had been the language barrier and difference in accents. There was a lot more of that to come. After a garbled conversation to organise refuelling for the following day I hopped in a cab, bound for the motel in Cannes.

  With the flying behind me I watched out the window as Cannes zipped by. The place was amazing and everywhere I looked seemed to scream ‘money’. We pulled up at the motel and I read the taxi meter. No. Impossible. I nearly had to sell the Cirrus to pay for the cab fare alone.

  As I unpacked I grabbed the air conditioning remote but everything was written in French. I pressed a few buttons, a red light began to flash and the room started to become warmer. I told the front desk about my slight dilemma as I set off for a walk into town, they laughed at me and said something I didn’t understand.

  I carefully dodged the Vespa riders with their determination not to live, while drooling at the cars parked on the sidewalk. Bentleys, Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Rolls Royces and the rest, many with international number plates. I had no idea what these owners did for a living but I had a feeling they weren’t pilots.

  It was a typical French scene, with little cafes and restaurants by the water and thousands of people wandering the streets. I wandered around the marina where the yachts were parked, millions and millions of dollars’ worth of machines as far as the eye could see. I was just blown away at how the walkway onto the boat extended from the hull, let alone everything else that was going on.

  I had walked for a couple of hours round Cannes, but after another long day I was ready for bed and I grabbed something to eat before walking back to the motel. I can’t remember what I ate, but it wasn’t that exciting. However, what little I had seen of France was amazing. I had seen a vast amount of different cultures and ways of life since leaving home, but Cannes seemed different. It had character.

  I woke up to a motel room that simulated the conditions of the polar icecap; I had no idea which air conditioning button the man from the front desk has pressed, but it ha
d no doubt worked. Due to my lack of skills in reading French I decided to leave it as it was. Better to be cold than hot.

  I only had one full day in Cannes and needed to somehow find my way back to the airport to organise the refuelling for the Cirrus while I packed the plane for the next leg to Greece. Having only just resumed a normal breathing pattern after paying the first cab fare from the airport to my motel, I had to find another way to get around. I knew I was too young to drive a car and had no faith in my ability to drive on the wrong side of the road but there was one other option. I could join the locals, lose all will to live and hire a Vespa. So I did.

  Before I knew it a black van had pulled up in front of the motel, a little French guy hopped out and introduced himself. On the phone only an hour before he had told me that no licence would be required to ride the 50cc Vespa. What was more, I could hire one for the day and still pay less than a one-way cab fare to the airport. Sweet.

  He wheeled a shiny red step-through Vespa, something I had only seen in a Jim Carrey movie, out of the back of the van. I hadn’t ridden any form of motorised machine with only 50cc since I was seven. I asked the same question over and over again, ‘Will that Vespa carry my not-so-French and not-so-slim self up the steep hills around Cannes, and will it get me to the airport alive?’ He laughed a little harder each time I asked, apparently confident I wouldn’t have a worry in the world.

  He organised a time to meet and pick up the hopefully intact scooter from a hopefully intact rider that afternoon and said goodbye. I now had my very own set of wheels, kind of, for the first time since leaving Norfolk Island. I packed a backpack with everything I needed for refuelling, threw my legs over the red Vespa and pulled on my white open-faced helmet. Wow. I was practically French.

  I zipped out and onto the wrong side of the road. The Vespa had one gear and with the throttle wide open it sounded like a blender attempting to puree rocks. Even so, its noise was slightly drowned out by the hundreds of other scooters now huddled around me, so maybe that was a good thing.

  With the GPS strapped to the handle bar and programmed direct to the airport, I set off and swerved through the little streets in the centre of Cannes with a smile from ear to ear. This was fun. Although I had not planned this, I soon found myself on a highway, keeping as close to the median strip and as far off the road as possible. Because I was an unlicensed rider the 50 kilometres per hour speed limit was set in stone, not something to experience on a highway when everyone else found 100 kilometres per hour so much more convenient.

  Before long I pulled up outside the terminal and took off my white helmet. I wasn’t quite the type to be seen on a little red scooter but the fact I was in France seemed to make it okay. I hid the helmet in the seat and set off with my backpack. That ride had been serious fun, but now it was time to concentrate on preparing the aircraft. At the desk I asked about a fuel truck to be told that I would need to taxi the aircraft across the airport and to the fuel bowser where I could refuel myself. After giving them a ten-minute crash course on how to refuel a ferry tank I had them convinced that holding up the bowser for over an hour would be a bad idea and miraculously the fuel truck was on its way.

  I unpacked all the equipment from the Cirrus and laid everything on the ground. There was stuff everywhere. As I was about ready to refuel the truck pulled up with some fantastic news. ‘We can’t drive the truck on the grass, just taxi the plane and put it on the sealed concrete over there,’ they said. I took a breath and repacked the plane, hopped in and started up. I had to request a clearance from the tower before moving anywhere, and as we were chatting away the refueller returned and began yelling through the door.

  ‘Oh, actually, it’s okay, just pull it forward ten metres and we can refuel there.’

  I apologised to the tower and crept a couple of metres forward before shutting down. The guy pouring the fuel spoke no English at all and his mate stood by translating. They had a quick chat and told me that once refuelled the plane would need to be pushed back to the old position. Another crash course in refuelling a ferry tank let them know that it would be near impossible to move the newly refuelled plane onto the grass as it would be too heavy.

  I hopped back in and started up, said a sheepish hello to the tower and requested taxi to the original concrete pad. After a little conversation they agreed to let me leave the aircraft there overnight as I was departing early the next morning. Maybe they just didn’t want to hear from me again. We parked up and finally began to pump fuel into the wings while I emptied the plane once again and laid the ferry tank out flat before beginning to fill it with fuel.

  We had wasted over an hour just moving the aircraft fifty metres from the grass to the concrete, but at least I was now really good at packing and unpacking the plane. I tried to relax and as I was bent over with my head crammed into the cabin the airport manager showed up. He was extremely apologetic about the confusion and offered any assistance he could, but with all jobs covered we ended up having a casual chat. It was hard to have a structured conversation when every second word was, ‘Sorry, say that again,’ or simply a blank look when I accidentally used some form of Aussie slang, but the Frenchman was not going to give up.

  As I continued refuelling he popped his head into the cabin with his iPhone in hand and said, ‘Oh, listen, you will know this!’ I recognised the song and the singer, but I had to take a second to make sure what I was hearing was correct. It was Slim Dusty belting out ‘Waltzing Matilda’. How on earth had this guy found this song? I had just ridden a Vespa, walked the streets of a French city, played my part in a Monty Python-type translation session and was now listening to Slim Dusty sing Waltzing Matilda crammed in the cabin of the Cirrus with a guy whose favourite word was ‘sorreee’. I still laugh at the memory of the whole scene.

  I repacked and locked up. It had taken a few hours but it was over and I was ready to ride on. I organised a departure time for the morning before mounting the red menace of a machine that screamed horsepower, hit the electric starter and unleashed each and every one of its 50ccs.

  I rode straight back to the motel to take care of a bunch of emails I needed to sort out, along with writing a blog and studying up on the leg to Greece. The usual jobs took an hour or two before I needed to focus on a new issue, Egypt.

  My route was to take me to Rhodes in Greece before a flight down to Aswan. However, Egypt was currently in a crisis bordering on civil war. With the situation worsening daily we really needed to look at our options.

  We had people contacting us left, right and centre asking for an update on what we planned to do; the situation in Egypt was extremely volatile. I had first started thinking about our other options in England. If we decided to divert we needed to do it soon in order to have the correct permits and clearances approved. A flight without those could mean being arrested, something which was not on my bucket list.

  I was headed towards a part of the world that could certainly be described as interesting, a part of the world where ferry pilots had come to grief, a part of the world where bribery, or ‘excessive targeted tipping’, was considered near normal, where people would take advantage of any situation if it meant making money. Anything that would make the transition through a complicated country as smooth as possible was certainly to be wished for. We juggled the options and with the help of Mike and White Rose in England we decided to change the routing. Instead of Aswan I would spend a night in Aqaba, Jordan, before continuing on to our originally planned stop in Muscat, Oman. With the decision made the approval process began.

  I sent emails to update everyone on the route and I was constantly in contact with Dave Lyall as he let the appropriate media people and sponsors know about our change in plans. I looked at the issue of flight planning and luckily had the correct charts on hand as Aqaba sat not too far away from Aswan. I would still depart for Greece the following morning but would spend one extra day there to make sure everything had been lined up correctly, then I would head to Aqaba,
just north of the Red Sea. Sounded okay in theory.

  With the jobs completed and the next day’s flight plan studied, I grabbed some board shorts and a towel and the keys to the Vespa and set off around the centre of Cannes, the area I had walked through on the night I arrived. I had a near-death experience at an intersection that consisted of eight lanes proceeding in five different directions and decided the best way to stay alive was to follow someone. I cruised up and down the water’s edge, trying hard to concentrate on the road each time a Rolls Royce or Ferrari drove past, as I took in the sights of the French Riviera. I spent a couple of hours just riding around, taking on an uphill winding road that gave amazing views of Cannes before heading in the opposite direction to find a slightly less cluttered beach on the way to Nice. I parked the Vespa on the sidewalk and dove in the Mediterranean Sea for a quick swim. It was amazing, picturesque and very European, but very different from the beaches in Australia, the best in the world.

  When the day was over I parked the Vespa behind the black van where the little French guy wheeled it up the ramp and closed the doors. I handed back the helmet, GPS and keys and found myself feeling a little sad to see it go. That said, I wouldn’t be seen dead riding a red Vespa wearing a white helmet around the beaches in Australia. Apart from the refuelling process, this had been the most relaxing day of the entire trip. I had been concentrating so hard on staying alive that I forgot about the issues of the flight, where I was going next or how far was left to go. It was great.