And now for something completely different! Ari, her father, and I drove to an airfield near Barcelona where Joan was going to take us for a flight in a small fixed wing plane. This was our second attempt after the first was thwarted by the weather not playing ball. Joan has been flying these small planes since retiring some 15 years ago.
We arrived at the Sabadell airfield and began filling out paperwork. There we met Joan’s co-pilot, Francesc, and we headed out to the tarmac to check out the plane. It was a little Cessna four-seater, I guess. It certainly wasn’t an A380. The pilots checked the plane over and opened the doors. Ari climbed into the back seat and I started to follow. Joan put down his foot and let out a loud “stop!”, which was a bit confusing. Instead he crawled into the back seat and I was directed to the front seat. Ok, that’s nice, I thought. I’ll get a better view in the front seat next to the pilot.
But this wasn’t quite it either. I laughed and said a few times that Joan should be up the front instead of me. Francesc started to tell me a few things about how the plane worked, strictly informational, I thought. It wasn’t until we’d already taken off and were flying for a few minutes that it finally clicked that I was expected to be flying the thing. It turned out Francesc was a flying instructor and this was my first lesson!
We took off and flew out towards Barcelona, crossing the hills with views down to the city. Francesc told me what to do, pulling the yoke (“steering wheel”) caused us to climb, pushing it caused us to drop down, turning left or right caused us to bank left or right. I tried it out. He was right. We weren’t supposed to go into the Barcelona airport control tower control zone and had the radio tuned to the Barcelona air traffic control channel, in case something unusual happened. I could hear British and American accents.
Nothing unusual happened and we headed to the coast, banking to the left and flying along with the beach visible below us to our left. The blue water and shoreline looked very nice.
Francesc told me to head inland and we banked left again and flew over some hills with a large grey cloud above us. We turned left once again and followed the motorway back some way to a navigational tower that marked the edge of the controlled airfield airspace. We entered the airspace and headed back towards the airport. Another turn and we were descending towards the runway.
Francesc cheerfully mentioned that approaching too fast was not good and approaching below 50 knots or so was also sub-optimal as we’d fall out of the sky. He pointed at lights on the runway. We should see two red and two white ones, otherwise we were either coming in too low or too high. Interesting stuff. I felt a bit uncomfortable doing anything much during the landing and just nudged the yoke a bit thinking that Francesc would make the necessary corrections, which he did and we were on te ground again in the right number of pieces.
It was a very nice little adventure and very nice of Ari’s dad to plan and sponsor the whole thing.
