Perspective
Last December the Doc refused to renew my PPL medical & sent me to see a heart surgeon instead. I’d half expected, I guess, that my last ride in a helicopter would be related to an engine failure at low level or some weather related calamity, when it fact it was down to the pump inside my own chest.
Anyway, I moped around glumly for a few weeks then finally accepted the reality of the situation & sold my beloved little R22. After that the wife & I said goodbye to our grown children & departed for our first holiday without ‘em in twenty years.
Somewhere between snorkeling, fishing, lazing at the beach & hiking on Lord Howe Island I stumbled across Bryan Monkton’s “The Boats I flew”. There was a paragraph in his book describing an encounter with a weather front (see below) that made me realize all pilots see the world in much the same way. Once you’ve flown sumfin, be it chopper or plank, your world view is somehow changed forever. And that, nobody can take from you.
From page 28, “As we approached close to this might wall, all sense of proportion is reduced to the truth. No longer are we in a large flying ship that is accustomed to passing disdainfully over the insignificant features of the earth below, the model like-like rivers, bays & headlands, the toy houses and buildings, but have suddenly become so puny alongside this towering structure of nature that we ourselves seem to belong on glass, beneath a microscope”