Officially, she was Zulu Whiskey Delta Bravo, Z-WDB, but they all called her Dog’s Body, a 1969 Cessna 172K that I first saw in a WWII Wellington bomber hangar at Induna Field, a grass airstrip a few kilometers east of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I was learning to fly at Induna Field because opportunity and resources finally came together for me at a pre-kids, funny money time of my life. Flying didn’t seem very expensive when paid for in Zimbabwe currency that couldn’t be legally taken out of the country. Why not spend some of it on a skill I could export legally? Although I was a little shy the first Sunday I showed up at the Bulawayo Flying Club, it wasn’t long before I felt like one of the lads.
At one of the first visits, I met my flight instructor. Roger was a former Rhodesian Air Force pilot who flew charter flights after the war and spent Sundays as a flight instructor for anyone who would have him. He hadn’t lost his military brusqueness but at 17 stones, he had lost much of his military bearing. We made a plan for me to start, once I got an airman’s physical (the “send a recent photo and proof of life” variety), a proper Zimbabwe airman’s logbook, and a student learning permit.
When the big day arrived, Roger and I walked over to the hangar, a vast WWII structure built to house a couple of Wellington bombers and a handful of Spitfires, in preparation for the remote possibility of Nazi hordes crossing the Zambezi River and marching on Bulawayo. The bombers and fighters were long gone and the hangar was instead filled with Cessnas, Pipers, and a bright yellow Tiger Moth biplane from the late 1930s. Walking into the old hangar was like walking into a toy store when I was a kid.
Roger led me to the flying club’s training aircraft, a red and white, 108 horsepower 1960 Piper Colt, which was nicknamed either “the flying milkstool” because of its ungainly landing gear, or “the flying manhole cover” because of its rather steep glide angle. Z-YUD, or Uniform Delta, was the first real airplane I ever touched, explored, and studied. The long, silver aluminum tubes people are jammed into are a whole different species compared to that little Piper Colt. Made of steel tubes, wooden strips and intricately fabricated wings covered in cotton and painted with a special finish, plastic windows, visible control cables, and a little engine that was started by hand, it was probably Wright Brothers v.3.0, but it was, as Roger insisted, a proper aero plane.
Roger had a habit of grunting out “Right” at the beginning of any endeavor, so I waited for his first set of instructions.
“Let’s go duel with death,” he said as he placed my right hand on the throttle, pushed it forward and we started bouncing along the grass runway. When we attained the correct speed, he instructed me to ease back on the control yoke and miraculously, we were airborne. We slowly climbed to pattern altitude and made a long parallel rectanglular around the airfield. After we made a final 90 degree turn that lined us up with the runway, we started descending toward the point where we started our flight. Roger talked me through the final approach maneuvers and with a good deal of his assistance, we safely landed, only to open the throttle and fly the same pattern again and again until that first hour was over. My first touch and goes. I was exhilarated.
For the next several Sundays, we repeated the same maneuvers for an hour at a time. Roger intervened less and I started to understand landings, that difficult skill of transforming from a flying machine into a driving machine. I struggled during those first few hours as I learned to “drive” the Colt with the rudder pedals. I complained about it to Roger, who replied that “I didn’t know enough to know how much I didn’t know,” and it was his job to make those assessments. Someone later told me an aircraft cockpit is a poor learning environment. I decided they never flew with Roger if they rated it as only a poor learning environment.
One Sunday, as we prepared to duel with death, Roger announced that we would spend an hour practicing stalls, a deliberate maneuver to cause the airplane to stop flying. It was important to learn, Roger told me, so I wouldn’t die from my ignorance, so off we went to the practice area.
To safely practice stalls, which I thought was an oxymoron, we had to climb to an appropriate altitude. On those hot African afternoons, when the air was less dense because of the heat and the airplane performance was less spritely, it took awhile to get to a safe practice altitude. When we finally reached our lofty practice altitude, Roger instructed me to reduce the engine power and gradually raise the noise until the little airplane stopped flying and dropped its nose toward the earth. I was then instructed to increase the power and raise the nose. We were flying again and climbing back to altitude so we could stop flying and fall from the sky time after time.
Then it was time to practice power-on stalls, where the engine is kept at full power and the nose is raised steeper and steeper until the airplane runs out of airspeed and the nose drops alarmingly and steeply toward the good green earth. After enough power on stalls to satisfy Roger’s sadist bent, he announced that it was now time to practice spins.
For a fledgling pilot, spins sounded even less appealing than steep stalls because they involved all the terror of the airplane pointing steeply toward the upper atmosphere, then dropping nose first toward the ground with an additional even more terrifying element of the earth slowly rotating in front of us. It is important to note that spin training is not required in the United States because so many accidents occurred during training. Fortunately, I didn’t know that fact as we climbed to an even higher altitude for spin practice or I might have mutinied. We leveled out for a few minutes and then Roger instructed me to begin a steep, power on stall. Just before the airplane lost its momentum, he instructed me to turn the control yoke in a full left position and the rudder pedals (that I also used for driving, not very well, on the ground) in a full right direction. It felt, for a micro second, like the airplane fell over backwards, but instantly shifted again so that the view out of the windshield was of the hard, unforgiving earth rotating straight down in front of us and the control yoke felt useless. Roger talked me through the recovery. Counterintuitively push forward on the control yoke, carefully reduce engine power, and straighten the rudder. Rather slowly for my preference, the control yoke regained its authority and I was instructed to gradually pull it toward me until the the airplane was once again flying level. We lived. Easy peasy. But Roger wasn’t finished with me so we continued spin dicing with death until it was time to land.
The following week, after a few more stalls and spins, Roger told me to land and stop in front of the clubhouse. “Right,” he said as he opened the door and got out. “Off you go, but remember, in Zimbabwe, we can replace people, but we can’t replace aeroplanes.” So off I went with full knowledge of my station in life. I was replaceable.
I distinctly remember two things about my first solo flight. First, the little airplane seemed to leap into the air without Roger’s 17 stones on board, and secondly, it seemed strangely quiet without his brusque commands. I decide that since I was finally captain of my own fate, I would fly the pattern as long as I wanted and so I flew pattern after pattern until I finally decided to land and expertly drive the little airplane directly in front of the clubhouse.
As I walked in, everyone except Roger was gone and he asked me “how was it?” “It was peaceful, Roger, and the airplane lept into the sky.” He grimaced and true to his Rogerness, he grunted, “Right. Next week then.”
All the way home and probably for the rest of the week, I smiled and thought about how I was now a proper aeroplane pilot. Sure, I had a lot to learn yet, but I flew an aeroplane by my little ol’ lonesome and didn’t crater it. That’s official pilot stuff right there.
To be continued.
I'm sure glad I knew the outcome all along (survival, at least). Roger sounds like a perfect teacher for a humorist! 😅
Thanks for the ride ... flight. I'm sending this to my husband who will undoubtedly remember all the fun he had learning to fly a 172, what we affectionately call an orange crate with wings.