PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Your flying tales sought for BBC One Show
Old 8th May 2013, 09:06
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peterh337
 
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This has come up here before.

One could make a series based around a flying school, which would make good viewing.

The various relationships, the instructors routinely shagging female students (two of mine got students pregnant, and a 3rd had to vanish totally for years after doing something, ahem, more borderline, and is out of aviation totally now), your prebooked lessons getting bounced because a group with half the world's supply of titanium in body piercings and bags of lard hanging halfway to the floor drops in for a pleasure flight, the student getting lost and phoning in 2 hours after the fuel must have run out saying she landed on some runway in the south east but doesn't know which because there is nobody around, the old ladies spending their inheritance because they like sitting close to young virile instructors and never mind being way past 100 hours with zero chance of ever getting a PPL, the instructor getting students to fly over the instructor's house to take photos of it, the lessons where you do the NDB stuff in the plane in which the ADF works and you do the VOR stuff in the plane in which the VOR works but the ADF doesn't, the instructor doing a "pretend DME" by calling out the distance off a £50 GPS from Milletts because the DME in the plane always reads some plausible figure between 3nm and 7nm, you name it. And that is just from my 1 year hanging around the scene.

Post PPL, as an owner, the stuff you could come out with could get you evicted from the airport. Non owners have no idea what goes on.

There are some great grey-haired characters, ex cargo 747 pilots, who tell great stories about stuff they did flying illicit British arms cargo to Africa. But most of them won't talk on TV about the best of it.

Then you get the fast talking conmen who can spin a fantastic yarn about their (fake) ATPL, their (fake) flights across the world (nonstop UK to Singapore in a PA46)...

So, yeah, you could make a fun programme, along the lines of the recent KAVOS expose on TV not long ago where drunken Brits were puking and bonking and puking all over the place, but I don't think it would do GA any good unless it was done responsibly, with input by real pilots who care about GA, but there are no such guarantees in TV production. They can use your material and use it any way they like no matter what they told you beforehand.

Last edited by peterh337; 8th May 2013 at 09:10.
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