Permissible Limits (45 page)

The Mustang was a big plane, he said. It was forty per cent heavier than a Spitfire but the design was technically more advanced. It was built, he told me, around a very simple proposition. That it would out-fly, and out-manoeuvre, and out-range anything else in the sky. It was a fighter pilot’s mount, a thoroughbred in every conceivable respect, and that meant I had to adopt what he called a very definite mind-set.

‘
This machine doesn’t know you’re not a fighter pilot.’ He was holding out the little model at arm’s length. ‘So that’s what you’ve got to become.’

Yesterday’s adventure with the Harvard and the smoke bomb suddenly began to make sense.

‘
You mean that?’

‘
Absolutely. No question about it. That’s what this plane expects. I’ll be taking you to the limits. I’ll be showing you bits of the envelope you never knew existed. You’ll be doing things here that’ll seem crazy at the time - high-g accelerated stalls, vertical departures, post-stall shimmies from blown overheads, the whole caboodle. At the time it’ll scare the hell out of you and you’ll be asking yourself what on earth all this has to do with your kind of flying, but believe me, you’ll be grateful.’

He got to his feet, leaving the model on the desk, and went over to the window again. Down on the hangar floor I could hear the phut-phut of a rivet gun. I reached for the Mustang, turning it slowly in my fingers, still listening to Harald.

‘
We’re talking extreme situations, Ellie. You’ll get to think like a fighter pilot, fly like a fighter pilot, do everything else like a fighter pilot, and who knows? It may one day save your damn life. That’s what we tell the guys here, the ones that come up from the south. We tell them sweat more in peace, bleed less in war.’ He turned round.
‘Does that make any kind
of
sense?’

I said it did. We finished the carton of orange juice and went back to the sunshine outside. The light and the heat hit me like a hammer blow. I did the external checks on the Mustang then struggled into the parachute harness and let Harald strap me into the front cockpit. The aircraft had been refuelled already, and within ten minutes we were airborne. Harald had given me a notepad to slip into the thigh pocket on my flying suit, and every time I hit a snag or had a query, he made me scribble a note to myself. These, he said, would take us through the debrief. Not only that, but adding yet another little task to my in-flight list would stretch me the way I needed to be stretched.

He was right. Flying the Mustang imposed an incredibly heavy workload - eyes, ears, fingertips, nerve ends - and paying the aircraft the respect it deserved took every ounce of my concentration. Time and again, over the weeks to come, Harald was to hammer this message home. It was all about detail, he’d insist. It was all about preparation, about getting the smallest things right. The truly successful pilot, the guy who’d die in bed, was the guy who’d get immense satisfaction from the smallest of the small print. A perfectly plotted course. An exquisitely flown instrument approach. Finding the best technique for bringing various aircraft types
smoothly
to a halt. Only by mastering the small things, he said, would I be able to build that faith, that inner confidence, that would enable me to cope with split-second decisions that could otherwise lead to catastrophe. Without that confidence, any pilot might one day be overwhelmed.

‘
By what?’

‘
The terror.’

It was our third sortie of the day and I was exhausted. To my shame, and perhaps relief, I’d even forgotten about Jamie.

‘
The terror?’ I repeated blankly.

‘
Sure. Flying’s unnatural. We were never meant to do it. If it’s an expression of anything, it’s an expression of will.’ He paused. ‘We all want to play God. Flying tempts you to do just that. You get to think you’re all-powerful. There’s nothing you can’t do, no place you can’t go. Then - BAM - something happens, something breaks, something falls off, and hey, you’re as mortal as the next guy.’

I checked the mirror. I’d never had Harald down as a philosopher but there was a new tone in his voice, a thoughtfulness I’d never detected before.

‘
I disagree,’ I said. ‘I think flying’s completely natural. At least, that’s the way it feels to me. Maybe I’ll come back as a bird.’

‘
You are a bird. You fly very well.’

‘
You mean that?’

‘
I do.’

I felt the warmth flooding through me. Up above 6,000 feet, high above the coast, we’d been practising recoveries from clean stalls. Time and time again, I’d slow the aircraft down, nudging back the stick, waiting for that tiny tremor through the airframe that signalled a loss of control. The wing always dipped to the left and the first couple of times I had my heart in my mouth as we plunged earthwards. But Harald was right about pushing the limits. The more I practised the stalls - even the trickier ones - the more routine, the more familiar, they became. I wasn’t, after all, flying a legend. Merely a very powerful aeroplane with imperfect manners and a tendency to bite hard when you weren’t paying it the right kind of attention.

This realisation gave me just the beginnings of confidence. I could get on top of this. I could hack it. From the back, Harald said very little, setting me trap after trap, challenge after challenge, but I could tell from his tone of voice that I was doing OK. One of my landings, an absolute greaser, had even drawn a second or two of applause.

I looked down at the ribbon of beach below, smothering a yawn. This was Florida’s Gulf shore. Late afternoon, the shadows of the big waterfront condominium blocks were beginning to lengthen and I could see a pair of motor cruisers ploughing up the coast towards the smudge of a distant marina. The Mustang seems to fly nose down. The view forward through the grey disc of the propellor is better than most planes and there’s a tendency to think you’re forever in a shallow dive. I’d noticed it first on my maiden flight with Harald, back on the Isle of Wight, but already I’d mastered the urge to check the altimeter, another little sign - I realised - that this thing wasn’t quite as intimidating as I’d thought.

I got on the intercom to Harald. Fatigue was beginning to get the better of me, though the last thing I
’d
ever
do
was admit it.

‘
What next?’

‘
Home. Standfast.’

‘
We’re through?’

‘
For today, yes.’

‘
You want to give me a heading?’ ‘No, use the map.’

I slid the map out of the pocket to my right. My own version of dead reckoning put us thirty or so miles south of Fort Myers. The next city along the coast was Naples but I resisted the temptation to
do the obvious — hang on until we got there and then fly the radial
back. Instead, I dropped the left wing and pulled the aircraft round until
we
were heading north-east again. On a day like today, with good visibility and no wind to knock me off-course, I knew I
’
d
fly close enough to Standfast to make a visual contact. After that, with my new-found confidence, it would simply be a matter
of
pulling off another yummy three-pointer.

We droned inland, the sun still hot through the canopy. I could hear Harald singing to himself behind me, an old John Denver song. The heat and the music compounded my fatigue and once or twice I had to fight to keep my eyes open.

Then, very suddenly, I heard a voice in my earphones. It was Harald.

‘
Five o’clock low,’ he said. ‘I have control.’

I felt the stick jerk sideways out of my hand. Harald was flying the Mustang now, standing the aircraft on its starboard wing and hauling it round in a turn so sudden and so tight that I began to pass out. A huge weight was crushing my chest. I could hardly breathe. I tried to reach for the dashboard but my left hand wouldn’t move. I began to panic. I’d been in plenty of g turns with Adam but nothing this painful.

Abruptly, the pressure eased. We were near vertical, still diving. I did my best to focus on the altimeter. Two thousand three hundred feet and unwinding fast. The stick moved again, coming back towards me, and I braced myself as the savage pull-out forced the blood into my legs. Colours drained from the cockpit. Everything went grey. And then I heard Harald laughing, not quite a laugh, more a yelp, and I peered forward through the windshield, seeing another Mustang, silver and red this time with a yellow and black chequer-board tail, hanging in the air in front of us.

The pilot must have seen us at this point because he broke hard to the left, diving for the ground. Harald followed him, a slightly tighter turn, gaining all the time. My eyes were swimming. Bits of gleaming swamp were coming up to meet us and I tensed for the inevitable pull-out. When it came it was even more brutal than the last and I think I must have lost consciousness, because the next thing I remember is finding ourselves back at altitude - 3,000 feet at least - with the black and yellow tail of the other Mustang still filling the windshield. There must have been some kind of protocol in these mock dogfights because I could hear Harald exchanging banter with the pilot up ahead. They were talking in Spanish, and when they’d finished Harald came back to me on the intercom.

‘
Guy’s name’s Ernesto,’ he grunted. ‘And right now he’s a dead man.’

He muttered something else about the perfect bounce, then gave me back the stick. Every nerve in my body told me to stay a passenger for the rest of the day, but after this morning’s little pep talk I knew that simply wasn’t an option. What we’d just been through was a little mild horseplay, nothing else. There was one landing left and the privilege was entirely mine.

We were second in the circuit after Ernesto’s Mustang. I watched him cranking down his gear and then make the last turn on to long finals. I switched the fuel to the fullest tank, throttled back, and with the speed dropping below 170 knots checked for three greens as I lowered the undercarriage. My temperatures and pressures were good. The tower had given me clearance to land. Glancing down to the left, I pulled on my harness, then selected full flap for the final approach. Trimming and re-trimming, I lined the aircraft up with the approaching runway. At twenty feet, I eased the stick back, letting the aircraft sink, waiting for the soft kick of the landing. With the nose up, I’d lost the horizon. Adam used to talk me through this in the Moth. ‘If you can’t see the bloody runway,’ he’d say, ‘then it must be there.’

And it was. I felt a couple of nudges, then the rumble of tyres told me we’d landed. The stick well back, I anchored the tail wheel to the runway and then applied the brakes, gentle dabs at the toe-pedals, nothing too forceful, nothing that might put the aircraft on its nose. The grass beside the runway began to slow. With 600 metres still in hand I went for the first of the two run-off exits, winding back the canopy and letting the hot, moist air sluice in. I put one cheek into the slipstream. My face was bathed in sweat.

‘
You did great.’

It was Harald. I thanked him. I wanted to sleep for a year.

He came to my room to collect me at half past seven. I’d even been too tired to read the rest of Jamie’s letter. Harald was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of black jeans. It shouldn’t have suited him - too young, too hip - but somehow it did. For a man of fifty-five he still had an amazing body.

I sat in his car, an imported Jaguar XJS. It smelled of new leather and that special wax they put in the body sections.

‘
I thought you were joking,’ I said. ‘You should have saved yourself the trouble.’

‘
Taking you out?’

‘
Making the effort. You’re the one who’s going to have to do the talking. I’m dead from the feet upwards.’

We drove into Fort Myers.
All I
really remember
is an endless avenue of palm trees, miles and miles of them, following the river all the way to the bay. When we got to the ocean, we crossed a bridge on to Sanibel Island. The sidewalks were thick with elderly couples, stooped and nut-brown. Harald drew up outside a restaurant called Clancy’s. We got out and he tossed the keys to the uniformed doorman.

‘
You hungry?’

‘
Starving.’

The table he’d reserved was at the back. We picked our way across the floor, and when we’d sat down a waiter came for the drinks order. I had a small pitcher of home-made beer. Harald stuck to Diet Coke. Waiting for the food to arrive, we went over the day’s flying, instructor and pupil. Again, Harald told me how well I’d done. I said I’d enjoyed it. It had been all the things he’d promised - a wild mix of challenge, terror and exhilaration -but thanks to him, I’d never once let it get on top of me. He liked that. It felt, he said, like the very best kind of compliment. It meant that I’d listened to him. It meant that I was gutsy as well as able. And it meant, above all, that he’d been right.