A Little Magic

When you are having a bad day, its the little things that can turn it all around.

In a little town near Equatorial Guinea, I watched two pygmy women walk across the apron with baskets full of bananas. We chatted for half and hour, then I watched gob smacked as they stopped a taxi and piled in.

The last I saw of them was eyes and big smiles, just peeping over the dashboard, waving goodbye.

Being A Pilot

I love my job; who wouldn't?!

There are days when it gets me down. When I ask myself why, for the sake of a mediocre salary I willingly live far from those I love, from home comforts and true friendship. Why each day, and many nights, I find myself battling through 60,000ft thunderstorms threaded with lighting and bashing heads with idiot passengers! But then I think to myself, I’m a pilot!

That in itself seems cool enough to justify all kinds of inconvenience. It’s something I have wanted to be since I can remember. It’s a cliché, but I must confess to fitting the cliché perfectly. As a little boy there was no greater treat than to ride in my grandfather's plane, while on the ground, I built endless models and pestered my parents for the ultimate toy, a radio controlled plane.

For the sake of my job I have moved much too often, loosing friends and saying goodbye to places where I was completely content. But then I have made new friends, more than any guy deserves and seen so many incredible things. How many people have experienced what I have? Flown over oceans, both Indian and Atlantic, into jungle villages and tropical islands, along great portions of the Congo and Zambezi, and watched the sun rise over Kilimanjaro to name but a few.

For the love of aviation I have lost true love and don’t clearly see how it could happen again. This is a hole that is hard to fill. But then, on a golden afternoon when the controller clears me to take off and my plane reaches for the sky, all I think of is that I am flying, and it fills me with a soaring joy.

If you have never flown you just cannot understand the obsession; but an obsession it is. One day I hope to have recovered enough from the addiction to perhaps give it up, or get my fill from the occasional fix. I desperately want to spend weekends with good friends, and evenings playing scrabble with my family in a real home; to wake up with someone I love and to be back for dinner. When that finally happens, I’ll hang up pictures of my adventuring days and rebuild that radio controlled plane that, on my first flight so many years ago, crashed into a million little bits!

But, until then; I’m a pilot! I love my job. Who wouldn’t!