FLYING AS A REAL REST CURE

Manawatu Times, Volume 62, Issue 105, 5 May 1937, Page 13

FLYING AS A REAL REST CURE

|Jntil last summer, I was absolutely earthbound; I refused to go to any aerial display, and when I passed Croydon I used to shake my head at the air liners and pity the poor lunatics who chose to go noisily and, as J thought, dangerously by air when they could have gone in leisurely comfort and comparative safety by train and boat, says Ann Stafford in the Listener. But then I was ill; it left me lame, cored, bad-tempered and exceedingly careful of myself. 1 rested and l rested and i rested; I went on being bored and bad-tempered and nervous. Until, quite by accident, 1 discovered that Hying was the cure I needed. It was the fault of a small boy who had to be transported to a part of England which takes half the day to reach by train and boat, but to which you can get by air in ten minutes. In a wild moment, I rashly suggested that cue of my friends and relations should •iy the child across. It never occurred to me that anyone would think that 1 should do it. In those days 1 expected people to go on saving me trouble and exertion almost indefinitely. But mv kind friends jibbed; they suggested that I should go instead. Worse, they took the tickets and drove me to the airport and watched to see 1 didn’t run away. 1 tried all I knew to get lost in the ticket office till the ’plane had left. But I never stood a chance; kind and competent officials, used to soothin gnervous passengers, assured me that ladies of ninety travelled by air with the greatest of calm. They led me firmly to tho ’plane, pushed me in gently (but with considerable difficulty, because so much resting had made me fat) and presented me with a horrid paper bag. Thank goodness, 1 didn’t need the paper bag; 1 was too busy being frightened, deafened and enchanted, each in turn, while the small hoy yapped madly beside me. And then, with the very gentlest of turns, the smoothest of glides, we wero down, bumping over the grass, and it was over. But in that ten minutes, flying had got me: I knew, too, that with very little more, even as a passenger, 1 should get m ynerve back again. For it wasn t much use jibbering with fright at the thought of crossing a rood or driving a car, when you had been up on equal terms with the clouds, for even ten minutes. Wliy, there are still quite a lot of people —young ones with the full use of their limbs and hearty health —who refuse to go up. It made me feel good just to look dow n on them. And besides, that feeling of being air borne, literally lifted up on the arms of the wind, w as intoxicating

WOMAN PILOT’S VIEWS

Utmost From Living

and miraculous and I had to have it again. 1 was up on one of those joy flights in a Hornett Moth—a neat little cabin two-seater fitted with dual controls, where you sit side by side. I had gone through my usual spasm of panic when we took off and tbe lesser ouo which comes at tho first turn, and I was feeling grand. It was one of those very steady blue days, hardly a bump in the air, hardiy a cloud. ‘The earth, banded with haze, was tranquil, lor the harvest was in. I looked out aud down and out and up, and along the spreading wing; it seemed to belong to me more than to the ’plane; even the noisy engine was just a part of my own reviving energy. Wo hung over the earth and compelled it to unroll beneath us. And then a loud cheerful voice said: Would you like to have a shot?’ Another voice, which I recognised in horror as my own, said that I would. Feet on the rudder, I learned to steer; hand on tho stick, 1 learned to move the nose up and down and bank to one side or the other—very gently. Then the voice said: ‘You’ve got her.’ 1 had: miraculously we were still in the air, still flying towards tho hills. Uf course, irritable commonsense just jeered aud said that naturally, these planes as good as flew themselves, and no doubt the pilot had set the thing •hq that any fool could fly it if she sat still and held on. Did that matter? Not a hit. All my sub-conscious was dancing with delight; it said 1 was simply roaring brave, no end of a fine fellow. A nervous ex-invalid? Me? Whj l , 1 was going to be a pilot. Iu that moment L was cured. 1 still am. But 1 might say that 1 am far from being the most amateur of pilots, though I can and do have all the exhilarating fun of learning. It gets better, too, as you go on. For one thing, you shed your years when you are learning to fly. You are back at school again, but meeker than you were. Instant obedience is demanded of you, and you give it. It’s such a relief for the people who have had responsibility for years, run a home, scolded children, ordered dinners —it’s such a relief, such a rest to one’s mind, to obey orders again.

And at first, you do this all the time. Even in a cabin ’plane where your instructor sits by your side, he seems to bo neurly all voice; and the Voice roars at you to keep your nose up, to bring up your left wing, to throttle back, to glide, to turn to tho left, to the left. And you do it. You are scolded, you ure browbeaten. Nothing but absolute precision will do; nothing /Ufc your best is good enough. But even jf it’s a fairly poor best, you win >our crumb of praise. You take a grip on yourself; you concentrate so violently on what you are doing that all the grit in your mental machinery seems to get dislodged. And even if you are not very apt, still you get, slowly, towards an entirely new r and superb coordination between your brain and your body. Brain, eye, hands and feet, they should work in absolute time, and though, of course, they don’t, still they get gradually towards a new standard of efficiency. This, by the way, goes on m one’s earthly life, so to speak. You find that you drive a r with infinitely greater precision and much better judgment. I've no doubt, if you aro a good cook (which I’m not), or a fine typist, you would find that your cooking or your typing improved too. For there’s something very valuable and, •ncidcntally, very comforting, about learning the delicate movements that are needed in flying. You have to be so very definite yet so gentle in the handling of tho controls; your hands must be sensitive and you must not make a single jerky or ill-judged movement. In learning the steadiness and serenity needed to control the machine something of these qualities persist after one has left it. Then there’s the question of fear; personally 1 shouldn’t enjoy flying uearly as much, and I don’t believe it would do me half aB much good, if I weren’t always, at some point, a little afraid. There’s something very exhilarating about being afraid and coming through it. Of course, the moment of fear keeps getting put off as you learn. At first you have it most acutely when you leave the ground; then you lose it till you begin to do take-offs yourself when it comes back acutely. Then it recedes again, and you get it when you begin to do landings. It's uever, 1

think, the fear of fulling, You don’t believe that you can fall because the air feels so solid. But though, your reason tells you that you arc—with your instructor—as safe as you would oo in a ’bus, your senses warn you that it is dangerous. You do know, all the time, that you must not make a mistake. And though you also know that if you did, your instructor would instantly correct it, still, with each lesson you come to rely more and more on yourself, and so the sense of danger, and therefore of fear, is always there to make you catch your breath. But, in its humbler forms, Hying is easy enough to be within most people’s compass. In good weather it’s actually easier than driving a car once you’re up. Even the intricaties of landing come to one in time. That doesn’t mean that skilled piloting is easy. But we’re talking about people who need a rest cure, who may not achieve solo dying, or wish to do it very much, hut who do want the feeling of occasionally borrowing wings. Of course, as my uu-air-minded lriends say to me, it’s no use. The answer to that it that one doesn’t want it to be any use. We spend 90 percent of our lives doing useful things; most of our pleasures are useful, or we make them so; we dine out or play golf for the social contacts it brings, or th© business acquaintances whom we can entertain, or for the sake of beneficial exercise. It’s a blessed rest to stop doing useful things and do something utterly useless and rather extravagant. For it is extravagance. Like any rest cure it costs a bit. But on the other hand one might be ordered champagne every day; and one can do a lot of Hying, spread out into short lessons, for the price of a dozen of good champagne. And so, though 1 may never get my A licence at all or be able to call myself pilot, never fly across country or own a ’plane, yet whenever life looks like getting me down, 1 shall go and have a lesson in the air, try a spin, or grapple with landings. And, when l com© down again, I shall be able to tell my worries just where they get off. i shall be able, without a tremor, to speak to the laundry or the butcher or my unruly child or the income tax or anyone else who annoys me, finish the article that dared to stick, tackle the book that refused to be written, eat my dinner with zest, and squeeze the utmost out of living. That’s what Hying—as a rest cure—does for you. Jt’s a very humble kind of flying, but that doesn’t matter; I expect a sparrow gets as much fun out of life as an eagle, any