Air time

James Leith

Kemble Airfield in Gloucestershire, formerly RAF Kemble, was once the home of the Red Arrows. City commuters from Kemble station nearby would return of an evening to find their cars covered in red and blue stripes from the smoke of a low-level Champagne Split.

Now the airfield is home to a couple of industrial tenants and several aviation-related businesses. One of these is Aero School Kemble. (If you want to fly, just ASK, geddit?) Here, for the price of a good secondhand Vauxhall, you can get your very own private pilot’s licence (PPL) in somewhere between 45 and 65 flying hours.

When I arrived for a trial flight, viciouslooking aerobatic aircraft were screaming across the runway simulating aerial dogfights. Flown by former Red Arrow pilots, these twoseaters were providing a corporate jolly for employees of local hero James Dyson. A company called Ultimate High provides, at a price, the experience of pulling three Gs in an Immelman turn and then, I suspect, throwing up all over the cockpit.

My ambitions — a one-hour trial flight in a Cessna 172 — were slightly tamer. My instructor, Simon, started flying at 16, got his instructor’s rating a couple of years ago and now, aged 27, works at ASK full-time. First I got the pre-flight briefing; not just a helf’n’safety requirement but full of interesting stuff about the difference between elevators and ailerons and why kicking the rudder pedal won’t make the plane turn and what’s the difference between an overshoot and an undershoot (see below).

Then out to what looks to me like an extremely flimsy, single-engined, high-wing number called something like G-RSWO which, all pilots will tell you, is pronounced Golfromeosierrawhiskyoscar or Whisky Oscar for short.

After a lot of bumping across the grass and taxi-ing on to the runway and running up the engines and talking to the control tower, the Cessna seems to jump off the ground within 15 seconds of Simon applying full power. We climb steadily to 3,000 feet, heading west towards the Severn Estuary, and while Simon demonstrates the effects of controls (pitch up, down; roll left, right and how’s this for negative G?) we change radio frequency to Filton to tell them who and where we are and where we’re going. We cross the Wye and turn left at Tintern Abbey before overflying Chepstow and the new Severn Bridge. Then straight across the top of Filton (a great view of Concorde) and across to Badminton and a tour of the southern Cotswolds.

Possibly the scariest words in the English language are ‘You have control’. Simon says this quite a lot and then waits patiently while I fail to maintain either altitude or direction until Air Traffic Control warns him about heavy traffic in the area and he wisely takes over again. North to the Cotswold Water Park via a low pass over our house, and up to Cirencester; then back down to Kemble and all in an hour.

As we turn on to our final approach, the dog-fighters are still at it and Simon’s head is revolving like an owl’s trying to track all the aircraft in the circuit. At the last minute, after we’ve been cleared to land, one of the stunt planes simply cuts in front and lands without so much as a by your leave. I can hear him sort of apologising to the tower, but I know he doesn’t mean it. If you can fly like he can, who cares about a little informality?

The flight costs £110 and could be used to take aerial photographs or check up on the whereabouts of your wife’s car, but if you want to know if you’d like to learn to fly, then this is the way to start.

Richard Burnett and his wife met while learning to fly at a school called Mason Air at Kemble, and when it came on the market, they bought it and renamed it. Having sold a computer business in 1998, they now run corporate days in motor sport and have a 45ft motor yacht at Gosport, but flying seems to have got them hooked.

‘Anyone can learn to fly. We have a 68year-old lady currently on the course and, while you may take longer as you get older (55 hours is average to get through the PPL), you can have a lot of fun while doing it. A flying club should be like a golf club. You go to fly but you also socialise, join fly-ins to other airfields or day trips to France for lunch. You can get breakfast in the restaurant at Kemble, fly to the Dutch Grand Prix and be back by tea-time. Caen is two hours away in a singleengined Cessna 172.

‘Twenty-five per cent of pupils are businessmen. Sometimes their company pays, but usually only when they are the owner and the MD. You can pay as you go at about £150 an hour or pay about £6,000 upfront for 45 hours’ tuition and all the exam fees and ground briefings.

‘Once you’ve passed, it doesn’t stop. You may pop in to hire an aircraft for a Sunday morning flip or to take your family to lunch in Scotland, but most PPL holders move on to get instrument ratings (it sure helps when you’re coming back from your Scottish lunch and the weather closes in), night-flying ratings, or even twin-engined qualifications and jet ‘permits to fly’. For £35,000 you could get yourself a Jet Provost and commute to your Aberdeen business meeting in 45 minutes. Forget helicopters ... they’re twice as expensive to fly, twice as difficult to learn and have higher maintenance costs. If recreation is what you’re after, then microlights are to light aircraft as motorbikes are to cars. Fun for a bit, but you wouldn’t want to fly to Le Touquet in one.

‘The landing fee at Kemble is £10 and at East Midlands it’s £12. Even if they’d let you land at Charles de Gaulle, you couldn’t afford it.’ Almost best of all — and here’s the golf club analogy again — is the bar-flying — the afterflight, after-round, drink-in-hand stories of frights and disasters. Richard Burnett has one. Shortly after qualifying, he called Kemble Tower on his downwind leg for clearance to land. ‘Can’t see you,’ said the tower. ‘Turning on to base leg now,’ he insisted. ‘Still can’t see you,’ came the response. ‘Turning on to final approach Oh f***! I’m at the wrong airfield!’ It all seems a very reasonable price to pay for so much fun. As for the danger, you’re more likely (although by no means guaranteed) to walk away from a light aircraft crashlanding at 45 knots than you are from a 747 pile-up. It’s all in the momentum.

And the difference between an undershoot and an overshoot? It’s the speed at which you hit the hedge.