Anything But Plane Sailing

A few years ago, I had a particularly interesting episode concerning a light aircraft Cessna 150. It was a catastrophic engine failure to be precise. When someone mentioned I should write about it, I dismissed the idea, I suppose because over the years I have encountered and endured so many close calls.


Stretching right back to my childhood, incidents like drinking petrol as a very young boy, just escaping being burned to death as the ground beneath my feet caved in on a burning underground fire, nearly drowning at sea when unable to swim, and falling from a helicopter seemed almost commonplace. I narrowly avoided being cut in half by a huge bulldozer blade, was only a mere couple of seconds away from being burned alive in an armoured vehicle, and but a fraction of an inch from being crushed between two halves of a train, which left a black greasy mark across my back.


Flying my Cobra glider one day, I was caught in and brought down by a thunderstorm. Having no option but to fly completely blind in torrential rain over a built-up area, I made a forced landing in a potato field sporting a meter-high crop. And I was once launched into the air sideways in a Discus glider, descending to earth in a horrifying crash at great speed, only to be encased upside down in the smashed wreckage. My life has been Anything But Plane Sailing.