‘Don’t worry it’s just like driving a car. Well, kind of…’ Duncan Keen, the Chief Flying Instructor at Skytime Flight Training, tried to reassure me as I sheepishly entered through the flying school’s doors. But with the vivid recollection of my disastrous early driving lessons – with the added disadvantage of being thousands of feet in the air should we need to practice emergency stops – my nervousness and excitement about embarking on my first flying lesson were hard to separate.

It was when I heard that the Piper PA28 Warrior aeroplane I would be flying in costs around £180,000 – just slightly more than a dual pedal Micra – that I really started to sweat. But as Duncan calmly talked me through the safety checks and flight plan, not to mention explained just how many people he’d taken on their first intrepid adventure into Gloucestershire’s skies, the last minute nerves started to settle with every sip of sweet coffee.

Skytime Flight Training, run by Duncan Keen and the ever-friendly Glenn Webster, is the youngest flying school at Gloucestershire Airport and has been in its current Staverton base for more than three years now. With an unmistakable Gloster Meteor parked by its roadside entrance, hundreds of amateur pilots and first-timers have passed through the hangar.

According to the experts the weather outside was perfect for flying, and so as the sun shone and the wind blew breezily across Gloucestershire Airport, I found myself clambering into the compact four-person plane – complete with retro ashtrays, comfy leather seats, and snugly fitting seatbelts – not to mention a panel of colourful knobs, switches and dials that looked like you needed a degree to understand. We donned headsets and Duncan spoke with Air Traffic Control over the radio before we were off, well almost, the engine was started and Duncan drove – yes, pretty much like a car – towards the runway. I even had the opportunity to do a bit of steering, showing a complete lack of hand-eye co-ordination as the yellow and white plane zig-zagged along the tarmac on the taxi-way, before we gathered speed, the undercarriage left the runway, and we started climbing into the sky.

As we headed from Staverton towards Tewkesbury, with barely a fluffy white nimbus in the sky you could see literally for miles and miles – the sunshine reflecting off pools of recent flood water, patchwork green fields, a bird’s eye view of the Malverns and even the skyscrapers of Birmingham looming in the distance. Calm in the knowledge that a professional pilot, with years of experience under his belt, was gracefully manoeuvring the great hunk of metal through the sky there was just enough time to be speechlessly impressed by the awesome views of the county below, before I remembered the job in hand.

Reaching a height of 3,000 feet at a speed of 115 miles per hour when Duncan uttered the impeding words ‘You have control’, he said later that my face turned a shade paler and my eyes were like a startled rabbit’s in the headlights. Gripping the handles of the aeroplane and gently – far too gently I think, because I needed quite a bit of encouragement to give it the ‘welly’ the little aeroplane could clearly take – I slowly steered the aeroplane to the right. Using the horizon as a rule, I then kept a steady – well, hopefully steadyish – course straight ahead before it was time to put my left turning skills into practice. In retrospect the sole responsibility for controlling a machine that you rarely get to see the controls of never mind handle was intense, but at the time focusing on manoeuvring was the only thought that went through my mind – whether I looked like a scared rabbit or not!

With 30-minutes of time literally flying by, back on land I stepped gingerly out of the plane and resisted the temptation to simultaneously text every single person I’ve ever known telling them I had actually flown a plane, and instead a smug smile of satisfaction – or perhaps relief – crossed my face as I realised that a lifelong ambition had just been well and truly achieved.

The good news is that while there are people who have a natural aptitude for flying, almost anyone can have a go. While lessons will set you back around £140 an hour if you decide to proceed with training for a Private Pilot’s Licence, as a once-in-a-lifetime experience the trial lessons are an affordable £68 for 30-minutes at Skytime. In fact, Duncan started his aviation career after he’d been given a half-hour trial lesson for a gift himself, so you never know where your first flying experience might take you.

After calming down from the excitement with a post-flight talk, all that was left for me to do was reverse out of the Staverton car park and meander my way through the rush hour traffic, but if I can handle a Piper PA28 Warrior, then getting my humble hatchback home seemed like a doddle.

Michelle Byrne
25 February 2008