Patterns in the Chaos

excerpts from 'Patterns in the Chaos' by David Scott-Morgan.
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First Solo 'Okay off you go. One circuit only please. Just do everything the same as you've been doing and er… don't forget …' there is the sudden check list of things which looms and falls like an avalanche, usually ending with..'and I'll be watching you' - although not spoken remotely like a threat and certainly not with any tone of concern; just the platitude of mom shoving her baby on stage with her angel costume pinned just so and her fairy wand stood ready to dance in time to the script of ten words that she has never yet quite spoken in the right order, but never mind, she has in fact spoken them. So darling off you go, once around the crib please, remember your lines and try not to bump into Gabriel and mommy will be right here and you're gonna do just great, and never let it be alluded to that mommy will be beside herself in mortified dread until you come back and then she will be rendered perfect in a state of bottomless joy if, or should I say when, you return victorious from the footlights with or without honour, just with your costume and smile intact….. The slipstream from the prop tugs at the door bidding you to close it and buzz off, and you turn to do just that but then an afterthought commands that you dive back inside the little cockpit: 'Oh and I've left my map here on the seat - No, of course you don't need it but it is a legal requirement that you carry a map.' That's right, forget the sick joke about it being repatriated in an uncharred condition, or the one about its usefulness in finding the way back from the Irish Sea. 'Do you really think I am ready?' 'Of course you are. You'll be fine.' Slam. The door closes and you walk away in a royal stride of confidence while inside you are shrivelling around the knot that has invaded the place where your stomach is usually found. You wonder how it is you can dare to make such bold predictions - 'you will be fine' - and you think of all the little items you have forgotten to mention and all the other items you have rammed home with far too much verbal and far too little example and so in all probability, to zero avail. But life is a wonderful thing. After all, life is a first solo. The wheels leave the ground and you are committed to sit in your machine until you and it have fumbled around that invisible racetrack and then, with a little help and a maybe pep talk from you, aimed back down the gulley of beckoning white lines and onto that enormous welcoming pillow of black tarmac with big white numbers and either side, grass and gravity and mom with a bar of chocolate. A first solo is always preceded by the instructor's radio call asking the tower :'Can you accept a first solo?' which really is a coded way of enquiring if the fire department is on station and ready to ride their greasy pole or whatever else they need to slither down in order to get the foam squirting in short order. It is a legal requirement - that the fire team are ready to go - but of course you don't let on anything about that. You try to say it quick so that the student maybe misses it, but then any student alert enough to drive himself around the sky should be compos mentis enough to spot the strange radio terminology wafting past. I remember hearing my instructor say it as we taxied around Birmingham Airport that autumn day in 1973 - 'Can you accept first solo?' - and the bolt of adrenalin followed almost immediately by the spanner of denial - no I hadn't heard him right, I must have imagined it. For who wants to hear such a thing before its appointed time? It was in 1993 that I completed the short course to upgrade from Assistant to Full Instructor, a nomenclature that carried the dubious privilege of being able to send students on their first solo. A scan through my log book reveals that since then I have sent about forty people first solo. I am pleased to report that all have returned with their costumes intact. But always it is an ordeal of special magnitude for the instructor as well as it is, of course, for the student.
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Vulcanology Outside the flying training club where I worked at Stratford there is an aeroplane parked up, slowly trying to corrode away. It is no ordinary aeroplane, not even the same shape that most aeroplanes are - it has no tail plane but instead one gigantic delta-shaped wing. It sits there, year in and year out, grandiose and resplendent in it's blue and grey camouflage, like a sentinel guarding the club, the airport, the empire! (for sure it doesn't know the empire has faded and equally for sure no one has the heart to whisper such a blasphemy within it's earshot). It is a 'Vulcan' bomber and it is big. It's massive wing swallows up four engines of a type that became the basis for powering Concorde, and the whole delta shape of the Vulcan was a precursor to the supersonic design. The difference is the vintage - whereas Concorde first appeared in 1969, the Vulcan is almost twenty years it's senior, first flying in 1950. But there are dark things about this behemoth - the darkest being that it was designed to atom-bomb Russia. And it's name - 'Vulcan' - is also suspicious, belonging to no English town, city or settlement that I know of. Not only is it not named after a town, it is also not named after Lieutenant Spock, as much as this knowledge will devastate the Trekkies amongst us. On the ground it is a giant camouflaged gazebo which I often walk under between training details, gazing up at it's cavernous bomb bay, lost in a daydream where I see it loaded up with nuclear nasties, it's engines revving away, while inside five freshly shaved young men talk numbers to each other in their professional clipped calm as they go off on their mission to end the world. I climb inside it. In the cramped compartment, over to one side, is a metal box with 'Handle Like Eggs' stencilled on it. I ponder what manner of foul genie lay stowed in that container, waiting for the coded call to set it free. Up in the cockpit, I squat in one of the two ejector seats (the other three guys down below had to jump out of the bottom). A Red painted handle glares at me, daring me to pull it - a note suggests that the firing pins have been removed, but have they?? Around the windows, a thick nylon curtain lies coiled, ready to pull down when the bomb is dropped, so that you will be preserved from the blinding flash and able to see where you are going. Able to use your eyes to fly back home and see for yourself the black lifeless ruin it has surely become. The Vulcan was the product of the Avro company but I have it on the authority of the Encyclopaedia Maximus Galactica that ever since the invention of the catapult, all Avro company bombers have been named after an English city or town (we all remember the 'Lancaster', even if we've never heard of the 'Manchester' or the 'Lincoln'). The strange fact is, my extensive library of maps does not show a place called Vulcan anywhere in Great Britain. But there must be one somewhere, because there is definitely an Avro Vulcan bomber parked outside our flying club. There must be a place called Vulcan, probably even a county called Vulcanshire. There must be citizens called Vulcans - or Vulcs for short, and the thing is, the more I ponder this machine, the more I think I am one of them! For I belong in that place where memories live, where the past refuses to be pronounced dead, where the dead refuse to be buried, a place colonized by those among us who are stricken with the malady called 'nostalgia'. And it's not just me…. Looking out from the clubhouse, I constantly notice a curious thing: The Vulcan's final trip to the scrap heap is forever being put back by a dads-army posse of unsung heroes. These 'Vulcs' (they must be Vulcs), are Royal Air Force veterans who spend their own free time lovingly attending to the many demands of this venerable machine. After striking up conversations with the Vulcs I have become privy to many interesting snippets of information. 'Our' Vulcan is one of the last ones made - a 'B2' (that means bomber mark 2). I can reveal that a mark two is distinguished from a mark one by an extended tail which houses electronic jamming equipment, and small protrusions under each wing which betray, like the glint of a concealed dagger, the evidence of betrayal in high places, for these hide the stubs of pylons where the Skybolt stand-off missile was to have been attached. The Americans thoughtlessly went and cancelled Skybolt after Her Majesty's government had gone and built these planes to carry it! But thankfully, the Vulcan was never called upon to fulfil its primary duty, and never dropped anything in anger except a few ineffectual bombs upon Port Stanley airport in the Falklands, in 1982. Yes, unrequited history is built into this aluminium artefact along with all the substance of drama, glory and heritage, and that is why these men scurry so tirelessly about it. For one day the glory must finally be gone, but please, let it not be today. I understand that! But then, I am a Vulc.
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Paper Round Pop stars do not get up at five thirty in the morning. This is a fairly well documented fact. If by any chance, a pop star is up at such an hour it is almost certainly because he or she hasn't gone to bed yet from the night before, or else maybe it's because like me, he isn't a pop star anymore. Getting up early is one of those ordeals that the grown-ups would odiously recommend to me when I was a knee-high, holding me with a Rasputin stare while belching fumes into my pubescent face, thundering those cruel words: 'it's good for the soul'. I was never that bothered to find out just how good it was for the soul. Not until an extra two and sixpence pocket money was dangled before me and I was goaded into taking a paper round. Yes, like many kids, I would grace the early morning streets and alleyways with my ever-diminishing sack of papers, the clanks and squeaks of my bicycle being the only offence against the pristine silence of the new day. Maybe that's where my aversion to getting up first thing came from. Later on, my flirtation with pop stardom only served to reinforce my suspicion that no good thing happened before midday and getting up early was strictly for the birds. But now I have another kind of paper round. Not delivering papers at all, but still in the business of feeding that same hunger - the need for news first thing in the morning. In my case the 'news' is that concerning the state of the road system around Birmingham. - How heavy is the traffic?; Is it moving?; Is it stuck?; Are roadworks or accidents causing any hold-ups? This is all accomplished from the elevated location of a twin-engined aeroplane which I fly while beside me, or else behind me with feet up, a radio presenter sits broadcasting information to the listening throng stuck in the world below. Nowadays it is a young lady who does this job, which seems to require container-loads of ready wit as she exchanges small talk with the Disc Jockey managing the show from the radio station on the ground. We loiter like voyeurs swooping over the landscape, peeping down onto the tangled knots of activity beneath. Orbiting over frozen junctions, espying a drip of traffic where there should be a torrent, our noisy presence announcing a freedom of action like a gloating boast, heaping further insult upon the grid-locked beings below. We watch as spontaneous traffic jams appear, especially on motorways, for no obvious reason, and then melt away again equally strangely. Traffic like a march of insects responding to invisible signals…. Yes this task, like the paper round, requires me to arise at what is for me, an unsociable hour. If that is indeed good for the soul as the grown-ups used to claim, in winter-time it must be a tonic finer than any water dispensed at Lourdes. For three months in the winter, between November and February, we take off before dawn, in what is known as the civil twilight (the pre-dawn halo), actually a most un-civil time to be doing anything except sleeping. Striding out onto the tarmac with the tank of de-icing fluid strung over a shoulder, a broom in one hand, a torch in the other; a scarf, gloves and woolly hat to keep the hydraulics around the brain from freezing up. Yes it's positively therapeutic, you can feel the goodness coursing through you along with the icy wind…. On those early morning missions I often bump into Ralph Hitchcock. He works for the company that handles all corporate flights at Birmingham International Airport and it's a fact that him and me go back a long way: Years ago Ralph and I lived in the same road in Tile Cross and he was actually the manager of the first 'proper' group I was in - Jeff Silvas and the Four Strangers. And before that, we would often be hanging out as aircraft spotters together as we were both mad about aeroplanes, enough to swap reg numbers and photographs and visit air shows. Expeditions would be promulgated to Castle Bromwich aircraft dump where we would play inside the stacked fuselages of old Lancaster bombers, and steal mementos from them, before a watchman would come and shoo us away. It's funny how our long-distance love for flying machines has induced us over the years to be in close proximity to them and I guess it's because deep down we are both still anorak aircraft spotters at heart. Our flight with the callsign 'Airtax 964' - a reference to the radio stations' frequency of 96.4 - goes everyday, regardless of weather and I get rostered to fly it once or twice a week. The only time it gets grounded is when the weather is below our operating minima. Basically this means when it's fogged in. And then sometimes when the weather is nominally above minima, it is still not prudent to take to the air because the weather, being the most capricious of things, is able to frustrate the met men and their forecasts and leave Airtax Nine Six Four marooned up in the sky orbiting around waiting for unscheduled fogs to clear. We always carry enough fuel for such eventualities of course, but there is also the other problem that being a little aeroplane, it only has outside toilets.. I enjoy flying. I prefer doing battle with the elements rather than doing battle with people. The weather can be sneaky and duplicitous but it will not bear you a grudge and hunt you down if you win it fair and square in combat. And the aeroplane will not say 'I don't ever want to see you again' if you lose your rag with it and tell it it's useless in a moment of frustration. Since getting my licence I have slowly amassed 2,300 hours at the controls of an aeroplane, most of it since getting my Commercial licence in 1995. Now I can fly in cloud, at night, in muck and mist and rain and hail; I can fly on the airways - the motorways of the sky - where you can hear the 'heavies' calling in on the radio, beings with far-flung accents steering their giant floating hotels across the heavens to distant destinations. Places that sound great and that you have never seen, and so by definition, are exotic and desirable. Yes it's a privileged club and yes it's wonderful. Thank you Lord. Grounded I have to report sadly, that I am no longer a commercial pilot worth the name. It was stolen from me in the summer of 2003 by dint of cruel small print which declares that piloting public transport flights is out of bounds for sexagenarians. The upshot is I can fly commercial operations with others, but on my own, I am grounded. As if to put balm on the wound, right after this news came in the Chief Pilot announced he was leaving our air-taxi company and being the most senior in experience, I was offered the job. This means I am now responsible for navigating around a mountain of paperwork as it appears to be the cardinal decree of aviation law that no aircraft should leave the ground until the red tape relating to its mission weighs at least as much as the aircraft itself. I have also acquired the heady title of the Line Training Captain which means I sit and watch others drive and give my sixpenneth of advice, anecdotes and useful tips, always remembering the bringer of useless ones gets invited to use the outside toilet.. But on a positive note, I have written a book. It's called 'Patterns in the Chaos'… You should read it!
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	Patterns in the Chaos by David Scott-Morgan. ..a biographical litany of my meanderings, from growing up in Birmingham and being part of the sixties group scene, to playing guitar for the Electric Light Orchestra (ELO) in the eighties. It includes stories of being a flight instructor and a Commercial pilot. Meeting Jesus and becoming a Christian in 1988, becoming the lay pastor of a church in Birmingham. Stories also about Romania and some of the wonderful people I have met, some of whom happen also to be famous.