Motoring
Fantasy flying
Alan Judd
Last year I confessed that, although an automotive snail, I am prey to aeronautical fantasies when driving on motorways. As the perspective narrows to a point far ahead, I feel that if I put my foot down and pull back on the wheel the nose will come up and we will have lift-off. I imagine I can bridge-hop, taking off this side of one and just clearing it before landing neatly on the other.
It became apparent that others are simi- larly afflicted (we are talking only of fan- tasies and of forward motion, preferably mechanical, and although horseback would can't even fall of a log.' be permitted the great majority involve four-wheels). Some suffer precisely the same condition, only with greater authority. A wartime bomber pilot, David Hearsey DFC, confessed that 'the magic moment for me is at around 95-100 mph (early morning, no traffic) ... the speed at which a heavy four-engined WW2 bomber, Hali- fax or Lanc, with two thousand gallons of fuel and upwards of five tons of bombs shows signs of becoming airborne ... the relief was immense that 30 tons of aero- planes would make it before running out of runway, sometimes only a thousand yards long. Now of course the motorway stretch- es out for miles with no worries in the imagination; indeed in some parts of the widened M5, once I've got me wheels up, I can make it under some of the bridges.'
A friend confessed to having whole-crew flying fantasies on his motorbike. On long cold journeys he would play the parts of navigator, bomb-aimer, pilot, mid-upper gunner and so on, speaking their voices aloud and so providing himself with a run- ning commentary on the action.
An extension of my own recurrent fanta- sy is that I'm returning from a raid pretty badly shot-up, port outer losing oil and stuttering, starboard inner on fire, under- carriage jammed, tail-plane damaged, navi- gator unconscious and a bomb stuck in the bomb bay. At a certain period of the war, I'm told, three large aerodromes near the east coast switched on landing lights for a while when the droves of wounded or thirsty bombers were returning. Each had three parallel runways, one lit white for those short of fuel or lost, one green for the moderately damaged and one red for those for whom it was that or nothing. Alongside this latter were tractors with hawsers, and as each flaming carcass crashed in, it was hauled off to the side to make way for the next. Now, whenever I approach suburban traffic lights, I am feathering my engines, trying desperately to keep the nose up, and coming in on the red. (There is a sequel, to which I've never etched in the detail, involving a picturesque but painless scar, a temporary limp and a WAAF waiting in an open-topped tourer.) This may sound dangerously inattentive but day-dreaming while driving is surely common; haven't we all driven competently from A to B and afterwards not recalled a single feature of the actual driving? Most of us pay at least as much attention to where we are or who we're with as to what is happening. I've had three accidents, all fortunately slight, two of which were due wholly to my inattention (including an embarrassment with a steam-roller). Day- dreaming is probably as common as our habit of driving too fast too close and the fact that there aren't many more accidents says a lot for humanity's foot/hand/eye co- ordination. We're all within inches of death everyday on the roads and think nothing of it. When was the last time that you con- sciously and for more than a few minutes tried to drive better? I'm not sure I know what my bad driving habits are, but I'm sure I have them.
One response to these fantasies of for- ward motion might be to embody rather than forbid them. Future manufacturing techniques should give us more individually tailored vehicles. If I could cruise along in something resembling the fuselage of a Halifax bomber, strapped in with my gog- gles and Very pistol (but wingless, I sup- pose, which is a pity because I'd like to see the props turning), I might be forced to pay more attention to what I'm doing. Mean- while, if you spot a pale abstracted face behind the wheel of a 13-year-old Range Rover (the latest acquisition) making a just controlled descent, engine alternately feathered and revved, remaining flaps down, keep clear and have the hawser handy.
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