Today’s prevailing mood:
Fear not, dear blogee(s)! If we should ever be together on a flight in an Airbus A340, both pilots should die and the autopilot should fail, I now know that I can land the aircraft. Nice to know, huh?
I was having a thoroughly disagreeable day on Friday, courtesy of a particular solicitor's inability to think one small step ahead and take simple steps to avoid crises. Agh! Three families will thankfully never know how close they came to not moving this weekend, despite their long standing plans to do just that. Were it not for my unwelcome intervention it would have all gone wrong, which the solicitor in question seemed to think would be OK. For the love of God, etc… As an act of divine mercy, in came an email from a company called Virtual Aviation offering late availability flying a flight crew simulator. What a fillip! One phone call and an unwise amount of cash later, I’d booked in for a shared one hour in the simulator at Manchester airport for today. This left me mentally uplifted until I next had to speak with said solicitor; sadly a mere 30 seconds or so later. I took off from Manchester airport, flew a big circuit and then came back in again to manually land the aircraft. Sadly, it didn't give me time to do a captain’s voice announcement to my 300 virtual passengers. I shared an hour in there with two others, neither of whom had ever flown but both of whom managed to get the aircraft back down on the runway as well. If I were a better man, I'd be pleased for them instead of really quite irritated. To be fair, the instructor had left many more things on automatic for them.
No amount of seeing these things on the television conveys how convincing they are.
Experience tells me that talking about flying is interesting to non-pilots for precisely 53 seconds and so I’ll stop there. Let’s just say that as a pleasurable experience, it compares pretty favourably to an average sexual encounter. Unlike an average sexual encounter though, it’s possible to bring it up in polite company in order to impress people.
So now my flight log book includes a flight of an A340. So I’ve flown two seaters, four seaters and 300 seaters. Bizarre and very, very pleasing.
