Reviews
Radio 4 Midweek - October 17th, 2007
Listen to Nick talking about the book and aerobatics! He was so excited to be on the radio that he described the wrong humpty - it was the negative humpty, not the positive!
www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/midweek.shtml
And if you'd like to know more about the yummy organic food Nick makes - see:
www.rudehealthfoods.co.uk
Autumn Air Display at Old Warden - October 7th, 2007
www.airshows.org.uk
The Times Magazine - September 29th, 2007
I believe I can fly by Erica Wagner
For one Times journalist, piloting a Russian aerobatic trainer, was the next best thing to being a bird
I didn’t expect it would feel this good. The little cockpit of the Sukhoi is hot, and a minute ago – not to put too fine a point on it – I was pretty sure I was going to be sick. But now I’ve got the control column and my eyes are on the horizon, then looking out to sweep left and right. A couple of thousand feet below, the Surrey countryside is the very picture of Blake’s green and pleasant land. I push the column gently to the left, and as I do I feel the plane bank in the same direction. It’s only been under my command for an instant, and yet immediately the movement feels instinctive. We straighten up and then swing right and my stomach – normally fairly strong but unsettled, let’s say, by 15 minutes of turning in tight circles tipped over on one wing and a couple of snapping rolls – begins to calm down. The aerobatics were for the benefit of the photographer, Tom Miller, feeling equally queasy (I’m relieved to say) in the Yakovlev 52 flying within metres of us, turning as we turn, rolling as we roll. But now the pictures are done, and I am free to fly.
A few days ago it had been different. “Is there a problem?” I’d said to Andy as I sat sipping coffee at Fairoaks airfield. Beyond the caf?, the field was dotted with parked, expectant-looking aircraft, mostly with one engine or two and not more than a few seats for passengers, if any. Heathrow it ain’t. Here the dizzying bustle of the modern airport has been banished, and it’s possible to feel you’ve been thrown back a few decades – long before powered flight became an ozone-killing menace, when it was still glamorous and romantic.
Andy is the engineer of the plane I was about to fly in – this Sukhoi 29, an unlimited aerobatic trainer from Russia. Now, climbing into a plane these days is, as any air bore will tell you, far safer than climbing into a car. But at Heathrow you don’t get to listen to the ground crew mutter darkly to themselves before take-off.
Andy didn’t want to talk to me. Oh, I’d said, lightheartedly, come on. I’m a journalist. I have to ask questions. “And I don’t have to answer them,” Andy replied evenly. At that point, Nick Barnard, owner and pilot of the Sukhoi and author of the sensibly-titled new book How to Fly a Plane, strode back into view, wearing a green flying suit with a badge of the Red Starz, his aerobatic team, on its breast. He, unlike Andy, was smiling. “Let’s go,” he’d said, and we headed out across the grass to where the aircraft awaited.
I have always loved to fly. My father was a pilot: an American, he flew a B-29 Superfortress in the Pacific during the Second World War – it was a B-29, the Enola Gay, that dropped the first atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. After the war he was a test pilot – I’m not exactly sure what he was testing, since he told the Army he wouldn’t talk about it and he’s a man who keeps a promise – and then, for a while, flew DC-3s commercially for American Airlines. So you might say that flying was in my blood, though it would be fair to say that my father’s not one of those people – and I’ve met a few – whose lives are defined by flight. Flying in the war was not, I gather, an enjoyable experience; shuttling between Boston and New York was just plain dull. But (the story goes) my mother, upon hearing he’d flown in the war, determined to marry him there and then – so perhaps it’s her blood, not his. Alas, apart from a brief period in my childhood when a friend’s father would take us for spins in his four-seater Cessna, my flying’s been confined to long-haul jets, and over the years it’s grown harder and harder to maintain any thrill about going up in them, though I’ve surely tried.
As to flying a plane myself – no, never. So catching sight of Barnard’s book seemed heaven-sent, if you’ll forgive the pun. It’s an elegant volume with gorgeous photographs by Lucy Pope – she’s pictured hanging out of a cockpit on the back flap. Want to learn, in clear and simple language, what keeps a plane in the air? Curious about what pilots do as they prepare to take off? Then this is the book for you. It certainly is the book for me.
Barnard, who’s nearing 50 and has more than 1,300 hours in the air under his belt, is a man of many parts – but flight has always been one of them. His father was a Royal Navy pilot during the Second World War, and then after that a test pilot for Rolls-Royce. Barnard himself first took off at 13, in a glider, and went to Cambridge on an RAF flying scholarship to read economics. But he has lived as much on the ground as in the air – his previous books include volumes on home decoration and kilim rugs, and he is the author of the B&Q DIY handbook, no less. These days he’s determined to give Mr Kellogg & Co a run for their money with Rude Health – which produces and sells (look in your local Sainsbury’s; and from November, in Waitrose) tasty and wholesome breakfast cereal. Barnard is an intense and courteous polymath with a slightly diffident air; he seems an Englishman of another era, especially as he stands by the powerful engine and waiting propeller of his beloved Sukhoi.
On the tarmac, cleared for take-off, you’re reminded of what was said of the Spitfire: that this was a plane you wore rather than flew. Developed as a training aircraft for Russian airmen who would go on to fly MiG fighters, the Sukhoi is a no-expense-spared product of the Cold War; even its wheel struts are fashioned of titanium rather than steel. Straps over shoulders and hips hold you tightly into the plane; your parachute rests beneath you. (Barnard has calmly instructed me how to open it – “You’ll hear me say, get out get out get out!” – no mistaking that, then.) A Perspex canopy bubbles overhead; and when (with my kid-clad fingers in their elegant white flying gloves) you press a little button on the throttle you can speak to the pilot behind or in front; the one in command of the plane sits in the rear. You’re nearly prone, looking upwards as the plane taxis – somewhat unnervingly, it’s hard to see straight ahead, so on the ground the pilot has to weave from side to side, making sure there’s nothing in his (or, of course, her) path. The sky, this first day we go flying, is grey-white with a layer of high cloud. Behind us on the runway Tom Miller is strapped into the Yak, ten years older than the Sukhoi and less high-tech; but with a canopy that can be opened in flight so he can get a clear view.
But that first day the Yak doesn’t even get off the ground. The 365hp, 9-cylinder supercharged radial engine of the Sukhoi leaps into full life and as we begin to move what Barnard has written becomes startlingly clear: this is a plane that hates to stay on the ground. Later I’ll hear an announcer at the autumn airshow at Duxford exclaim, as the Red Starz began their display, that Barnard’s plane seemed to have taken off within 30 metres; it’s easy to believe. The compact, clever machine charged upwards – that is, it did until the engine (there’s only one, remember) began to cough. I sat very still. I recalled what Barnard had told me about how to release myself from the plane. I was very calm. I heard Barnard request permission to land and within 20 seconds, it seemed, we’d made a smooth banking turn and were back on the ground. Well, now at least I knew what Andy was bothered about. The timing of one of the engine’s two magnetos – similar to the distributor in a car’s engine – was a little off, hence the sputtering. Barnard was at pains to point out that while this is disconcerting, it isn’t dangerous; and that in nine years of flying the Sukhoi, it had never happened to him before. But still, no more flying that day.
I was eager to go up again. I don’t think of myself as a courageous person; there are many things that frighten the life out of me. Flying in a small powerful plane is simply not one of them, however. So a few days later I’m back at Woking station and then on my way to Fairoaks, where today the sun is shining and the engine’s magneto has been replaced (Andy drove all the way to East Anglia to get it).
And so it is that on a clear early September day I find myself looping through the Surrey skies. Even before I get the stick in my hand I can feel how responsive this machine is; sitting in the cockpit, you simply know that it wants to climb and dive and turn, almost as if it is an animate being. The trouble is that I feel like hell. Oh, yes, I’ve seen Top Gun (now there’s a confession) and heard plenty about “pulling g’s” – when the action of the plane exerts additional forces of gravity on the body – but I had no idea what that might actually be like. Now I do. How to describe it? Like seasickness? but a lot worse. After a couple of rolls and the spinning in tight circles earlier described (which Barnard later confessed is not his favourite thing to do, either) I wanted very badly indeed – despite myself – to be back on the ground.
And yet, how extraordinary it was, to suddenly feel not the earth below and the sky above but just the opposite. All the blood has gone to my head, I feel as if I am being flattened, but – look at that! The earth is over my head, the clouds beneath my feet. It seems like a splendid thing to be doing, if only one could keep from vomiting. “I’ve never had anyone vomit in my plane yet,” Barnard had said, and I was determined not to be the first. Fortunately, aside from his skill as a pilot, he is also possessed of kindness. He asked me if I wanted to dive. Unwilling to seem a total wuss, I said, ah, I’m not quite sure. “I’ll take that as a no,” said the voice in my ear, and it was straight and level from there on in. Once, Barnard told me later as we sat in the Hangar Caf? at the airfield, he’d been “beasted” by some boys in the RAF and had to lie in a darkened room for two days as a result. He assured me too that even these days, hard flying is something anyone’s body, however accustomed they are to it, will feel.
But below the clouds and above the earth there exists a peculiar, extraordinary freedom. The roar of the Sukhoi’s engine, your own body fitted so neatly into the fuselage, the width of the ailerons that enable you to sweep through the blue as if you command the air and everything beneath? this is what the Wright brothers, all those years ago, were after. What if they’d known what destruction – as well as delight – their development might bring? A useless question. Humans have always longed for this. So I’m glad of the promise Nick Barnard made me, when – down on the ground at last, sprawled on the blissful damp earth – he told me we’d go up again, no photographer, no tricks. Just me, the Sukhoi, and the broad, clear sky.
How to Fly a Plane by Nick Barnard and Lucy Pope is published by Thames & Hudson
See the Red Starz fly at the Shuttleworth Autumn Air Display at Old Warden, Bedfordshire, Sunday October 7 (www.shuttleworth.org)
Listen to Nick talking about the book and aerobatics! He was so excited to be on the radio that he described the wrong humpty - it was the negative humpty, not the positive!
www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/midweek.shtml
And if you'd like to know more about the yummy organic food Nick makes - see:
www.rudehealthfoods.co.uk
Autumn Air Display at Old Warden - October 7th, 2007
www.airshows.org.uk
The Times Magazine - September 29th, 2007
I believe I can fly by Erica Wagner
For one Times journalist, piloting a Russian aerobatic trainer, was the next best thing to being a bird
I didn’t expect it would feel this good. The little cockpit of the Sukhoi is hot, and a minute ago – not to put too fine a point on it – I was pretty sure I was going to be sick. But now I’ve got the control column and my eyes are on the horizon, then looking out to sweep left and right. A couple of thousand feet below, the Surrey countryside is the very picture of Blake’s green and pleasant land. I push the column gently to the left, and as I do I feel the plane bank in the same direction. It’s only been under my command for an instant, and yet immediately the movement feels instinctive. We straighten up and then swing right and my stomach – normally fairly strong but unsettled, let’s say, by 15 minutes of turning in tight circles tipped over on one wing and a couple of snapping rolls – begins to calm down. The aerobatics were for the benefit of the photographer, Tom Miller, feeling equally queasy (I’m relieved to say) in the Yakovlev 52 flying within metres of us, turning as we turn, rolling as we roll. But now the pictures are done, and I am free to fly.
A few days ago it had been different. “Is there a problem?” I’d said to Andy as I sat sipping coffee at Fairoaks airfield. Beyond the caf?, the field was dotted with parked, expectant-looking aircraft, mostly with one engine or two and not more than a few seats for passengers, if any. Heathrow it ain’t. Here the dizzying bustle of the modern airport has been banished, and it’s possible to feel you’ve been thrown back a few decades – long before powered flight became an ozone-killing menace, when it was still glamorous and romantic.
Andy is the engineer of the plane I was about to fly in – this Sukhoi 29, an unlimited aerobatic trainer from Russia. Now, climbing into a plane these days is, as any air bore will tell you, far safer than climbing into a car. But at Heathrow you don’t get to listen to the ground crew mutter darkly to themselves before take-off.
Andy didn’t want to talk to me. Oh, I’d said, lightheartedly, come on. I’m a journalist. I have to ask questions. “And I don’t have to answer them,” Andy replied evenly. At that point, Nick Barnard, owner and pilot of the Sukhoi and author of the sensibly-titled new book How to Fly a Plane, strode back into view, wearing a green flying suit with a badge of the Red Starz, his aerobatic team, on its breast. He, unlike Andy, was smiling. “Let’s go,” he’d said, and we headed out across the grass to where the aircraft awaited.
I have always loved to fly. My father was a pilot: an American, he flew a B-29 Superfortress in the Pacific during the Second World War – it was a B-29, the Enola Gay, that dropped the first atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. After the war he was a test pilot – I’m not exactly sure what he was testing, since he told the Army he wouldn’t talk about it and he’s a man who keeps a promise – and then, for a while, flew DC-3s commercially for American Airlines. So you might say that flying was in my blood, though it would be fair to say that my father’s not one of those people – and I’ve met a few – whose lives are defined by flight. Flying in the war was not, I gather, an enjoyable experience; shuttling between Boston and New York was just plain dull. But (the story goes) my mother, upon hearing he’d flown in the war, determined to marry him there and then – so perhaps it’s her blood, not his. Alas, apart from a brief period in my childhood when a friend’s father would take us for spins in his four-seater Cessna, my flying’s been confined to long-haul jets, and over the years it’s grown harder and harder to maintain any thrill about going up in them, though I’ve surely tried.
As to flying a plane myself – no, never. So catching sight of Barnard’s book seemed heaven-sent, if you’ll forgive the pun. It’s an elegant volume with gorgeous photographs by Lucy Pope – she’s pictured hanging out of a cockpit on the back flap. Want to learn, in clear and simple language, what keeps a plane in the air? Curious about what pilots do as they prepare to take off? Then this is the book for you. It certainly is the book for me.
Barnard, who’s nearing 50 and has more than 1,300 hours in the air under his belt, is a man of many parts – but flight has always been one of them. His father was a Royal Navy pilot during the Second World War, and then after that a test pilot for Rolls-Royce. Barnard himself first took off at 13, in a glider, and went to Cambridge on an RAF flying scholarship to read economics. But he has lived as much on the ground as in the air – his previous books include volumes on home decoration and kilim rugs, and he is the author of the B&Q DIY handbook, no less. These days he’s determined to give Mr Kellogg & Co a run for their money with Rude Health – which produces and sells (look in your local Sainsbury’s; and from November, in Waitrose) tasty and wholesome breakfast cereal. Barnard is an intense and courteous polymath with a slightly diffident air; he seems an Englishman of another era, especially as he stands by the powerful engine and waiting propeller of his beloved Sukhoi.
On the tarmac, cleared for take-off, you’re reminded of what was said of the Spitfire: that this was a plane you wore rather than flew. Developed as a training aircraft for Russian airmen who would go on to fly MiG fighters, the Sukhoi is a no-expense-spared product of the Cold War; even its wheel struts are fashioned of titanium rather than steel. Straps over shoulders and hips hold you tightly into the plane; your parachute rests beneath you. (Barnard has calmly instructed me how to open it – “You’ll hear me say, get out get out get out!” – no mistaking that, then.) A Perspex canopy bubbles overhead; and when (with my kid-clad fingers in their elegant white flying gloves) you press a little button on the throttle you can speak to the pilot behind or in front; the one in command of the plane sits in the rear. You’re nearly prone, looking upwards as the plane taxis – somewhat unnervingly, it’s hard to see straight ahead, so on the ground the pilot has to weave from side to side, making sure there’s nothing in his (or, of course, her) path. The sky, this first day we go flying, is grey-white with a layer of high cloud. Behind us on the runway Tom Miller is strapped into the Yak, ten years older than the Sukhoi and less high-tech; but with a canopy that can be opened in flight so he can get a clear view.
But that first day the Yak doesn’t even get off the ground. The 365hp, 9-cylinder supercharged radial engine of the Sukhoi leaps into full life and as we begin to move what Barnard has written becomes startlingly clear: this is a plane that hates to stay on the ground. Later I’ll hear an announcer at the autumn airshow at Duxford exclaim, as the Red Starz began their display, that Barnard’s plane seemed to have taken off within 30 metres; it’s easy to believe. The compact, clever machine charged upwards – that is, it did until the engine (there’s only one, remember) began to cough. I sat very still. I recalled what Barnard had told me about how to release myself from the plane. I was very calm. I heard Barnard request permission to land and within 20 seconds, it seemed, we’d made a smooth banking turn and were back on the ground. Well, now at least I knew what Andy was bothered about. The timing of one of the engine’s two magnetos – similar to the distributor in a car’s engine – was a little off, hence the sputtering. Barnard was at pains to point out that while this is disconcerting, it isn’t dangerous; and that in nine years of flying the Sukhoi, it had never happened to him before. But still, no more flying that day.
I was eager to go up again. I don’t think of myself as a courageous person; there are many things that frighten the life out of me. Flying in a small powerful plane is simply not one of them, however. So a few days later I’m back at Woking station and then on my way to Fairoaks, where today the sun is shining and the engine’s magneto has been replaced (Andy drove all the way to East Anglia to get it).
And so it is that on a clear early September day I find myself looping through the Surrey skies. Even before I get the stick in my hand I can feel how responsive this machine is; sitting in the cockpit, you simply know that it wants to climb and dive and turn, almost as if it is an animate being. The trouble is that I feel like hell. Oh, yes, I’ve seen Top Gun (now there’s a confession) and heard plenty about “pulling g’s” – when the action of the plane exerts additional forces of gravity on the body – but I had no idea what that might actually be like. Now I do. How to describe it? Like seasickness? but a lot worse. After a couple of rolls and the spinning in tight circles earlier described (which Barnard later confessed is not his favourite thing to do, either) I wanted very badly indeed – despite myself – to be back on the ground.
And yet, how extraordinary it was, to suddenly feel not the earth below and the sky above but just the opposite. All the blood has gone to my head, I feel as if I am being flattened, but – look at that! The earth is over my head, the clouds beneath my feet. It seems like a splendid thing to be doing, if only one could keep from vomiting. “I’ve never had anyone vomit in my plane yet,” Barnard had said, and I was determined not to be the first. Fortunately, aside from his skill as a pilot, he is also possessed of kindness. He asked me if I wanted to dive. Unwilling to seem a total wuss, I said, ah, I’m not quite sure. “I’ll take that as a no,” said the voice in my ear, and it was straight and level from there on in. Once, Barnard told me later as we sat in the Hangar Caf? at the airfield, he’d been “beasted” by some boys in the RAF and had to lie in a darkened room for two days as a result. He assured me too that even these days, hard flying is something anyone’s body, however accustomed they are to it, will feel.
But below the clouds and above the earth there exists a peculiar, extraordinary freedom. The roar of the Sukhoi’s engine, your own body fitted so neatly into the fuselage, the width of the ailerons that enable you to sweep through the blue as if you command the air and everything beneath? this is what the Wright brothers, all those years ago, were after. What if they’d known what destruction – as well as delight – their development might bring? A useless question. Humans have always longed for this. So I’m glad of the promise Nick Barnard made me, when – down on the ground at last, sprawled on the blissful damp earth – he told me we’d go up again, no photographer, no tricks. Just me, the Sukhoi, and the broad, clear sky.
How to Fly a Plane by Nick Barnard and Lucy Pope is published by Thames & Hudson
See the Red Starz fly at the Shuttleworth Autumn Air Display at Old Warden, Bedfordshire, Sunday October 7 (www.shuttleworth.org)
