By : Joan Walsh

The weather forecast had included showers, but the day wasn't that bad. Though there were a few clouds around, the nearest visible shower was a good few miles away. As we took off, small spots appeared on the windscreen. During climb out, these turner into a few larger spots so we turned into a tight downwind leg instead of continuing.

The raindrops got bigger and faster until it was getting difficult to see through the windscreen. At least open microlights do have the advantage that it is possible to look around the screen and see where you are going.

Licensed at last ! Joan Walsh and Ginger take a bimble

'Ouch' came the voice on the intercom - the guy in the right-hand seat had just been hit in the face by a hailstone. 'Worry about that when we're safely on the ground', I though as we banked hard round over the trees on to a very short final approach. The little Thruster behaved perfectly as we settled to a three-point landing on the wet grass and taxied quickly up to the hangar, splashing mud all over the wings, the cockpit and the two of us.

When the engine stopped, we could hear the rain thundering on the wings. 'Time for a cuppa', I said, for want of any more inspired comment. It is difficult to think of a clever comment when only a minute earlier you had hit your examiner in the face with a hailstone.. well, isn't it? The general flying test - the final hurdle to becoming a real, licensed pilot - and I'd just blown it by reading the weather wrongly.

A long (long) time ago, I was a keen, if infrequent, glider pilot. That was until the combination of child rearing and a career took too much of my time. I never lost the urge to fly and kept myself going with the occasional gliding holiday and siting next to the window on airline flights. I'd always loved flying: I had also regretted being unable to share that love because I was never qualified to carry passengers.

Joan taking off on her first solo. Low light and slow shutter make the Chevvron seem almost fast

That is until about four years ago when starting in the relationship with my present partner, Ginger (no jokes about Biggles, please), we found that we had a mutual interest in flying and that a new microlight training school had opened for business about 10min drive from my front door.

On most flyable days I could see a small aeroplane trundling gently round the sky. It looked for all the world like a little motorglider: could this really be the microlight? I thought that microlights were those noisy pram things hanging under a triangular umbrella. Wrong! This was a Chevvron. A brief phone call confirmed it was a microlight and also confirmed a trial lesson booking each for me and Ginger.

At the time I was struggling to pay off a mortgage which I had taken out just before the house-price slump at the end of the '80s, but I could just about afford to feed my addiction to the air as long as I restricted myself to no more than an hour a month. That forced me to accept that it would be many months before I could hope to have a licence, but the Chevvron was pleasant to fly, the instructors were good, and the toasted sandwiches and hospitality in the club hut made it worth visiting the field even when we couldn't afford to fly.

We became regular visitors and soon remembered those lovely aspects of small airfields that non-fliers miss: the peace and calm, the ducks visiting from the nearby reservoir, the pilots visiting from nearby aerodromes, the skylarks (in season), the hares dashing (in their season) about the short grass of the runway and the occasional chance to get airborne and be out-flown by a passing goose on its way home for the night.

Little did I know at the time that feeding my addiction would result in me making a 200 mile round trip every flyable weekend and even staying overnight in a motel in the middle of the Fens, just for an hour's training in my desperate attempt to become a qualified pilot.

Not long after I had gone solo in the Chevvron and was within sight of my pilot's licence, the flying school had to close. I was devastated, I'd spent so much of my spare money on learning and was to close, it seemed a crime to give up. We had been told that the Chevvron was not an easy aircraft to land properly and trial lessons in a Cessna 150 and in a Shadow showed that they were indeed much easier, so we were sure that it would not be long before I was back on track to a licence.

Over the next year and half, we tried several other flying schools but we missed the atmosphere of our first love and never settled in. One day, passing the now overgrown strip that we used to love so much, and seeing the sign 'Caution, Active Airfield' almost lost in the weeds, we decided that we would strike out and form our own syndicate, buy our own aircraft and start against (fools!).

The Thruster TST is a lovely aeroplane to fly, as long as you are not the sort of pilot who believes that the feet can go to sleep once the machine is airborne. Being ex-glider (and nearly Chevvron) pilots, neither Ginger nor I had any real trouble getting used to the co-ordination of stick and rudder needed for balanced turns. It has crisp responsive controls and is stable enough in the air to make flying a pleasure.

Until you are within three feet of the ground, that is! Then it can bite. The Thruster has conventional three-axis controls. Its engine is mounted high, above the cockpit, which means that the more power you give, the more it wants to power you give the more it wants to point its nose at the ground. The undercarriage is of the old-fashioned tail-dragger type-like a Spitfire, but it sounds good.

All in all, this adds up to a wee beastie that needs a pilot who can juggle, all at the same time, the control of the stick and the rudder pedals, the throttle and the elevator; responding to the effects of gusts on the very light airframe and guiding the thing on to the ground in the classic three-point landing attitude.

Get it wrong and the simple leaf-spring undercarriage will bounce the aeroplane blithely back into the air with insufficient airspeed to do anything but come ignominiously back down on to the runway with a rattle and a bang that can be heard in the club hut.

A lovely aeroplane to fly, but a little devil to land - and we thought the Chevvron was difficult! Ha!

It took may, many circuits and many, many, many landings to learn the knack. When we could do that with a headwind, it took many more circuits and landings to manage the same thing in a crosswind. By the time Ginger and I discovered this, we were - or should have been - committed.

We had sunk most of our limited savings into buying a second-hand Thruster and getting it ready to fly, but we were confident that we were nearly there. After all, we had the machine, it was based at a well-run private strip not too far from home and only a few miles as the crow flies from an active friendly flying school where they had agreed we could do our circuit training.

None of us reckoned on the NOMBYs (Not Over My Back Yard!). The Rotax engine is much quieter than the larger engines used on aircraft such as most club Cessnas and Pipers. Sadly, however, we still carry a bad reputation from the early days of microlight flying, not that many years ago, when the engines were not fitted with decent silencers and the aircraft flew really slowly and only on calm summer evenings.

Whether the people who complain at the sound of a microlight engine are right or wrong, we still have to live with them and we wanted to be welcome back at the flying club once we had our licences. So after a few unpleasant arguments, we admitted defeat once more and went in search of a new training field.

Our faithful instructor came to the rescue. He had just started work with a new school operating at a small airfield deep in the Fens, flying Chevvrons. I enrolled at that school with the intention of reverting to flying Chevvron until I had my licence, and then converting back to the Thruster. It nearly worked, too. I was solo again on the school Chevvron and flying round and round the circuit without the slightest squeak of a complaint from any of the few neighbours.

Then that school too and the Chevvron was taken away. The game of snakes and ladders continued.

We still had our own machine, though, so not all was lost it was just that it was 100 miles away, 21/2h by road each way.

So there I was. After becoming addicted only 10min from home, four years later I was spending 10h on the road each weekend just to get a couple of hours flying round the circuit trying to land the Thruster consistently. Washing and dusting were piling up at home and the kitchen was becoming a health hazard. At last, though, I was flying the Thruster solo and the written exams which had all lapsed were passed again.

The last remaining hurdle was the GFT. The unhelpful spring weather was proving awkward and it was only on the fourth attempt that we decided that it should be possible to get the GFT done between the showers. We did it in several spurts: first out to the south, do the general handling exercises turning, climbing, descending, then back for a cup of tea followed by circuits with a few examiner-induced variations and back for another cuppa; out again for ‘unusual attitudes’ (not recommended with a bladder-full of tea), then back home. I did pass, in spite of the incident with the hailstone.

The licence came in the post yesterday. Nothing can stop me now!

Reproduced from Microlight Flying (MF)