AEF flying, new cadet who had never been up in a light aircraft before (and before we had done any aeros),
Me: "what do you think of flying?"
Cadet: "awesome...!"
Me: "there is no charge for awesomeness....."
Ok, nobby in the extreme, but me and the cadet both had a laugh. It did make me (as an ex air cadet) realise how awesome AEF flying is for the kids and what a fantastic privilege it is to be returning the favour after all these years. My thanks goes out to all those who support any youth/cadet organisation and give their time, especially to the more mundane admin tasks.
Cheers
SP6
I'm sure I've posted this before but what the hell..
Many years ago I was a CI on a Volunteer Gliding
School and each weekend cadets would arrive for Air Experience flights.... except that sometimes it went a little bit deeper...
One weekend an ATC Squadron from a seriously deprived inner-city location pitched up and as I walked onto the field one of them, a young lad maybe 13 or 14, simply stopped in his tracks and almost whispered "Wow, all this green"... He'd never seen anything like it before, despite it being less than 10 miles from where he lived.
Come lunchtime when us G1s were allowed to try and get away (and stay up) from a single launch, I asked for a volunteer to miss lunch but 'to help with something important' and this lad's hand was first in the air.
IIRC, we got in 30+ minutes of soaring, with him flying much of it, and the look on his face afterwards was something I'll never forget
CS