Your Captain Speaking

By Scott Birrell

When Scott Birrell said he wanted to be a pilot after leaving school, his headmaster’s response was crushing: ‘Don’t be stupid, boy.’ This is the story of how he proved his ambition was anything but stupid.
After taking his first flying lesson at the age of 14, he went on to be a flying instructor, a commercial pilot flying the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, an international airline captain, a chief trainer, a senior pilot examiner and a major figure in the aviation world.
Read about his early “hooliganising”, flying low over fishing boats, his near-fatal attempts at aerobatics as a fearless young pilot, his dodgy adventures delivering aircraft around the world, and the time he was unwittingly involved in snatching Israeli DC-3s from Entebbe – the day before the notorious raid on the airport.
Discover what it is like to be on the flight deck of a jet airliner as, looking back on his career as a senior captain, he describes dangers he has dealt with – and discusses how other pilots handled potentially (and sometimes actually) fatal situations. He writes about aviation safety and how the industry needs to change to survive.
If you are a pilot, private or commercial, if you ever fancied becoming one, or even if you have ever been a passenger in a plane, you will find this a fascinating read. It is a brilliant book about flying by a man who really knows his business.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scott Birrell
• Release date: Nov 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781527273641

Scott Birrell

Scott Birrell has spent a lifetime in the air. Since taking his first flying lesson at the age of 14, he has racked up well over 18,000 hours of flying time. He is now retired from a distinguished career as an international airline pilot - but he still owns a share in a Cirrus light aircraft and flies whenever he can.

Book preview

Dad’s words

Think big and your deeds will grow,

Think small and you’ll lag behind,

Think that you can and you will,

It’s all in the state of mind,

Life’s battles don’t always go to the faster or stronger man,

But sooner or later the man who wins

is the fellow who thinks he can.

Walk tall, my son.

Papa

March 18th 1967

When I turned for help and advice from my wonderful pals, none hesitated. Stewart Moffat, Ben Bamber, Keith Danvers, Colin Budenberg and Rob Moody all came up trumps and without their time and effort this book would not have seen the light of day.

I would also like to thank Leigh for the huge task of proofreading the book.

And to Ruth, who has always supported me throughout our marriage, enabling me to fulfil my wildest dreams in my flying career, who has brought the children up brilliantly, often on her own during the many absences when I was off flying, I want to say: ‘I love you all around the world and back again!’

Scott Birrell

Bold? I’d rather be old

The Boeing B767 is unbelievably powerful. It is a long-haul, two-engine aircraft so it has to be massively over-powered. Taking off in a heavy B767 is never dull and never routine. I would taxi on to the runway for take-off and say to the guys on the flight deck: ‘Are we ready, gentlemen?’ They’d say yes, and I would add, just as the power came up: ‘Then let’s go on holiday!’

The next 30 or 40 seconds are exciting and critical. On take-off, as you are accelerating, particularly if you’ve got full power on, there is the most tremendous and exhilarating howl from the engines as you charge down the runway. You might still be on the runway as the jet is travelling at the best part of 200 miles an hour. You can’t help but feel this buzz.

Strangely, the sensation of speed as we accelerated down the runway was not what I’d be thinking about as we approached our decision speed. All I was thinking was: ‘Do I go? Do I stop? Do I go? Do I stop?’ Past 80 knots, we would only stop for an engine failure, a fire, a wind shear warning or if I believed the aircraft couldn’t fly. My eyes would be flicking between looking down the runway and inside at the instruments. As we reached V1, our decision speed, we needed to go. We had to fly, whatever happened, so I would be thinking: ‘Go, go, go!’

By the time the wheels and the flaps were up, I was pretty much disconnected from speed. I might be flying at four miles a minute or six, seven or eight. At that stage, it is just maths. If there is a thrill, it usually comes in relation to altitude. It certainly happened when I got up to 43,000 feet, which is as high as I’ve ever flown.

The sensation at that altitude is: ‘Wow!’ The sky above us is still not dark at that height - you would need to go up to 60,000 feet to experience that - but you can see the curvature of the earth and the fantastic cloud formations just by looking out of the cockpit window. The sensation of speed returns on the approach. As you get closer and closer to the ground, you seem to be getting faster. This is the phase where every pilot has to deal with the consequences of speed. Being aware of your proximity to the ground certainly holds your attention, even though the aircraft at that point will actually be flying at its slowest speed since take-off.

I love the B767, but even when I walk up to a Cherokee light aircraft now to go flying, I still get a tremendous buzz out of the fact that this sleek lump of shaped metal actually flies. I have never gone up to any aircraft that I’m going to fly without that excitement because I know that, little or big, this thing could actually kill me. I’ve always been excited at the prospect of flying an aircraft, but this excitement is always tempered by respect for what it is capable of. Even in a little Cherokee, if you get to 50 or 100 feet and the engine stops, you’ve got to hope you are going to be a bit lucky because at that point you may have nowhere to go. With luck, you won’t be looking at a housing estate. I still feel that tremendous thrill every time I take off, even today.

Back at school all those years ago, I had one plan and one plan only: I wanted to fly. In those early years, my ambitions were targeted in just one direction - I was going to be a flying instructor. With luck, effort and a bit of nous, I ended up flying the big jets. There is an aviation saying which goes: ‘There are many old pilots and there are quite a number of bold pilots. But there are a dwindling number of old bold pilots.’ I think about that sometimes, especially when I ponder the death of someone like my old mentor Jim Beaton, my first flying instructor. Jim’s death was incredibly sad. He was well liked and hugely respected as a pilot, but he is still dead – dead in an aircraft, and a single-engine aircraft at that.

I got to the end of my professional flying career without, as one of my colleagues put it, ‘screwing up’, but I would be kidding myself if I ever felt that was the end of the story. I will always want to fly, but not big jets. I have gone back to my first love: light aircraft. I still get a thrill as I climb into a single-engined aircraft for a bit of local flying or a trip for lunch over to Le Touquet. But when I do, the lesson of Jim’s death is never far from my mind. No matter how experienced, how competent or how skilful the pilot, one error of judgment is potentially just behind the next cloud or over the next tree line. You are being foolish if you treat aviation lightly. From a pure piloting point of view, there is a big difference between flying professionally as an airline pilot and controlling a little aircraft. In the jet, I always had a qualified crew around me and, as a result, it is a much safer place to be than in a single-pilot, single piston-engined aircraft, because the piston engine is considerably more unreliable than a jet engine. Jim was flying a piston-

engine aircraft in North America in winter and heading out to cross the

Atlantic with no radar and no de-icing. Flying like that, you are operating in an incredibly hostile environment and there is a good possibility that you are about to kill yourself. There’s no doubt about it.

The most experienced pilots of light aircraft in the world can make errors of judgment. The grave of famous pilot and record-breaking aviator Steve Fossett is proof, if that were needed. Anyone can make a mistake at any time, especially in a single-engine plane flying solo. There is no one there to say: ‘Are you sure?’

So will I carry those rather dark reminders into my retirement from professional flying? Absolutely! I’m pretty competent, I know that. I can fly a little aircraft fairly well but I never let my ‘seat of the pants’ ability disguise the fact that this machine will kill me given a chance. If that happened, it would not necessarily be as a result of mechanical failure. Jim Beaton didn’t die because of mechanical failure. He put the aircraft in conditions where it couldn’t fly. I have talked to pilots within a training environment for many years about judgment. It was one of my mantras – judgment, judgment, judgment. Where catastrophic mechanical failure is not an issue, people in planes die usually as a result of poor judgment by pilots. Judgment will ensure that you always respect the elements, that you make every effort to understand the issues of the upcoming flight. My colleague who raised the issue of ‘screwing up’ was a senior captain and he made that comment at a drinks do to celebrate his retirement. I have thought about it a great deal ever since. Today I feel very much the same as that retiring captain, and that is a good thing to have in the back of my mind the whole time, constantly reminding me that I operate in a hostile environment.

I’ve been incredibly fortunate to sit at the back of the simulator or the back of the flight deck and watch excellent pilots - and not so excellent pilots - deal with many difficult and demanding situations and consider situational awareness, workload and decision-making. I have developed good judgment skills and these I have tried to pass on when training and checking other pilots. I am maybe not as bold as some of my colleagues. I am not saying that they are wrong, it’s just how I perceive a difference in our judgment. If I diverted due to strong crosswinds and a colleague didn’t, that wouldn’t surprise me. Once again, it would just remind me that these aircraft will kill us all if the pilot makes an error of judgment. The retiring captain in the bar had spent his whole career flying. He was an ex-military pilot who joined Britannia and had a

second career as an airline pilot, and as a captain he could walk away from the airline with his head held high. That’s a very impressive record for anyone who has been dealing with the safety and comfort of ‘the public’ for many years in challenging environments. I reckon I managed to do the same… against the expectations of some of the people who formed judgments of me in my early years.

Don’t be stupid, boy!

He had always been a miserable bastard. But as an example of the benefits of a private boarding school education, I was not exactly the headmaster’s model pupil. In those days, there was no word in the Scottish dictionary – or any other dictionary, for that matter – for the ailment which was to become known as dyslexia.

So, to my grisly headmaster, this bespectacled, overweight boy would pass from the gates of Keil School, Dunbartonshire, with nothing much to recommend him – academically backward and lacking any kind of prowess at sports or on the rugby field. Nevertheless, before bolting for the school gates marked Exit – never to return – I felt it proper to present to this awful man a small token, perhaps imagining that even at this late hour, he might at least remember something good about Scott Birrell.

If I had expected gratitude or any semblance of warmth from this Scottish relic, my optimism was quickly dashed. After I timidly handed the headmaster a bottle of whisky as I said my goodbyes, it seemed for a moment that he might at last be offering me something approaching civility, when he enquired: ‘So what are you going to be, Birrell?’ With renewed affection for the old boy rising within, I replied proudly: ‘I’m going to be a pilot, sir.’

Reality struck back with a vengeance when he snarled: ‘Don’t be stupid, boy!’ I have never forgotten, and I have never forgiven, that comment. Those words remain etched across my heart to this day.

It wasn’t, of course, my earliest memory. The first thing I can remember is being in one of those old-style prams with a cover pulled over the top and looking through the little tassels. I was born on March 18th 1955 in Glasgow and we lived in a bungalow in Giffnock, which was a nice suburb. I remember Mum telling me she was going to have another baby. My brother is almost three years younger than me so I must have been about two and a half. I was the only child at that stage.

My father was a chemist and optician and ran his own shop and business in Govan, the shipbuilding part of Glasgow. My mother was a South African who had run a dance school in Johannesburg. She began dancing classical ballet but went on to do all kinds of shows in the UK. She and film star Julie Andrews, who made The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins, were pals and they were in shows together in England in those early years. So Mum came to mix with a lot of interesting showbusiness people - she even met American film star Mickey Rooney.

It was while she was travelling with one of her shows that Dad first saw her in Glasgow, where she was performing in a musical. He became so enamoured that he pursued her around the country, armed with large bunches of roses. Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, he won her over. They married on March 28th 1953 at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, in Claremont Terrace, Glasgow. After marrying Dad, Mum gave up her showbiz life. My father had been married before, although he never told me about it. I only found that out just before he died, from his sister.

It was quite a strange family, really, not that I thought about it at the time. My mother had a sister Lillian, who died of tuberculosis in South Africa, and my father had a brother and a sister. But those two never married and they ended up living together. They were my uncle and my auntie. I didn’t have an uncle ‘this’ or an uncle ‘that’, I just had one uncle and no cousins. They lived together in Glasgow and they both ended up working for my Dad. My Dad had another brother named Scott, who went to America. I can only recall ever seeing one picture of him which was taken on board some kind of cabin cruiser. I have no knowledge of what happened to him.

My father, my aunt and my uncle all seemed to have tremendous regard for their mother, who had been given a bit of a tough time by her husband. They rented a big tenement building in Glasgow, and I guess were regarded as working class. They certainly weren’t living in poverty because my grandfather was an engineer.

My mother’s mother was from an Irish line and her father was from a Scottish line, which extended a few generations back. Her father had been very successful and had managed to make and lose a fair bit of money a few times in his life, but the family story was that he gambled it all away in one night. Cyril also bred Pomeranian dogs and had significant mining interests at one point, according to his brother Hal, whom I eventually met a few times.

During the Second World War, before Mum moved to the UK, she enjoyed a good life in South Africa. She was brought up by a nanny, and when she came to this country, she couldn’t even boil an egg. But maybe due to the ups and downs of their financial situation, or possibly because of my grandfather’s eventual infidelity, there were problems in the family. So when my Mum came to this country, after winning an important dancing award, her mother decided to come too.

We lived in a good-sized bungalow with Mum and Dad, my grandmother and, on top of that, my aunt and uncle were around the house a lot of the time too. My aunt and uncle lived in the Charing Cross area of Glasgow where they had a big flat in one of the old tenement buildings. They would come around to our house and stay for long weekends, and at Christmas they would visit and not go home until March, which eventually drove my Mum quite potty.

In my earliest years, my cot was placed in the room in which my Dad had his own little bar. Eventually, I ended up in a bedroom and, by the time my younger brother Nigel came along, he and I had a double bed to share. However, they decided that our double bed was to be beside the single bed where my grandmother slept - and that’s where it remained until I left to go to boarding school, aged fourteen.

When I was eleven, Mum decided that she wanted to adopt a girl, and a little baby called Gail arrived in the house. In those days, the law was that the biological mother was allowed to take the child back at any time during the first six months, if she felt that was what she wanted. One day, coming home from school for lunch, I found Mum in floods of tears. They were taking the baby back after five months. What a terrible, terrible thing.

We had a cleaner who used to come to the house every week to help my Mum and it turned out that her niece was pregnant and was due to go down to London to give birth. Dad said to me: ‘I am not having your mother going through this again. I will not accept that.’ My next recollection is being in the back of a car with my Dad and sitting opposite were people I’d never seen before. Dad had an attaché case on his lap, and when he opened it up, it was full of money. Dad shut it, passed it over to this person, and said: ‘If you come for the child, I’ll kill you!’ This was in Glasgow, and the next thing I knew, Mum was going off in a BEA Trident to collect the baby in London. When she came back, I had my wee sister Traci, just five days old. Nigel and I always said that Traci came by a Trident, not a stork. Looking back, I was at that time, I guess, a little bit wary of my Dad. He was a powerful man, quite a big man, and in his shop he was

regarded as a sort of god-like figure. Sometimes I would be in the car with him and we would be stopped by the police. It was always quickly sorted out and we would be off again. When I asked him what it was all about, he said: ‘Oh, I keep a case of whisky in the boot and they just help themselves.’ On another occasion, he wound down the window and said to the policeman: ‘Do you know who I am? I am Jim Birrell.’ And off we went.

My father was an Edwardian sort of chap. I remember him telling me: ‘Your role in life, Scott, is to get a job and provide for the family.’ I would have been sixteen when he said that. Interestingly, it was not: ‘Your job is to be a good husband, to be a good father.’ He worked practically every day and no doubt felt he was fulfilling his concept of a husband and a father.

Every so often, as a family, we would go away down to Ayr or Largs on the coast – Mum, Dad, Auntie, Uncle, Nanny, Nigel and me. We would stay in a nice hotel, where Dad would go into the bar and drink. Mum would only have a soft drink, since we were brought up as Mormons and she didn’t drink alcohol at all, but she would dress quite glamorously – she would always stand out in a crowd of Glaswegian people.

When it came to dining out, I remember Dad telling me at quite a young age: ‘There is no point in tipping at the end of the meal. You might as well tip at the beginning because then you are going to get good service.’ He had a big moustache and would walk in wearing an immaculate white dinner jacket. No one wore white dinner jackets in the 1950s in Glasgow. Dad might have been considered a bit flashy in those days.

We went on holiday to Viareggio in Italy. Much of Europe was still feeling the effects of the war years and Dad said that people we met driving through Europe in the Jaguar had never seen such a grand car. It wasn’t until much later in life that I used to wonder how Dad could have afforded it all. The Italian trips went on until I was about eight and then Mum and Dad stopped coming altogether. But for us boys nothing much changed because every year my auntie and uncle took us instead. And we went and stayed at the same hotel and did the same things every summer for quite a few years.

Aged five, I was sent to Giffnock Primary School, where I would stay until aged 12, when I went to secondary school. I hated school in the early years. I was bullied and I used to run away and go back home. I had some good pals but this still didn’t prevent school being pretty unpleasant – until I found Billy McBean, who was a big boy for his age. I quickly discovered that by giving him two shillings on a regular basis, he would agree to become my protector. From that moment on, all bullying stopped. Sadly, if I thought I was miserable at my first school, my second school turned out to be much worse. There used to be knife fights in the playground. There was always the Catholic-Protestant thing going on in Glasgow and it was endemic in the

secondary school. Fortunately, I quickly worked out that when people said to me ‘What are you?’, I would say: ‘I’m a Mormon.’

The secondary school was called Wood Farm and was a big comprehensive. Needless to say, I didn’t like it at all and I struggled. I don’t think I really understood what school was for. I was well behaved, by and large, I didn’t cause any trouble, but the playground was nothing less than a battlefield. So one day I went home and said: ‘I want to go to boarding school.’

So my fourteenth year was quite a year: as well as Traci being born, I started at boarding school. More important than that, it was the year in which I completed my first flight.

Nanny who lived with us, had been converted to the Mormon faith in South Africa. The Mormons were very passionate about delivering their message to people on the doorstep. My mother and my grandmother were both converted at the same time and were baptised on November 17th 1931 at Mowbray, in Cape Province, South Africa. My grandmother gradually lost interest but my mother remained extremely strong in the church, as are my sister and sister-in-law. So I went to church.

By the time I got to fourteen, I was expected to go to church when I came home from boarding school but I used to get fed-up with being asked every time I went to church: ‘Oh, would you do this, or would you do a two-and-a-half-minute talk on something?’ It started to put me off the whole thing. One day Mum came into my bedroom and said: ‘It’s time for church.’ And I said: ‘I don’t want to go.’ I didn’t stop believing in it, I just drifted away. When asked now, I still say ‘I am a Mormon’ – even when I’m holding a glass of wine.

My boarding school, Keil, was on a fifty-acre site on the banks of the River Clyde, originally the property of the shipbuilding family, Dennys of Dumbarton. It was an independent secondary boarding school with 200 pupils and a few day boys. In 1978, it became co-educational, and it closed in July 2000. The site has since been developed for housing.

Arriving at the age of fourteen, I was starting in the third year. Most of the boys had arrived aged twelve. I arrived at Keil with Mum on my first day, a beautiful late summer’s day. We drove through the grounds and up to the large house, Isley Kerr, which was to be my house during my time there. There were lots of cars arriving and boys pulling large trunks out of the boots. Taxis brought boys from the airport back to school after visiting their parents in faraway lands. A lot of the boys’ fathers worked for the Foreign Office. Everyone finally went and I was left alone with this bunch of boys I didn’t know. I felt homesick. I phoned Dad one evening, saying: ‘I don’t like it here. I want to come home.’ Dad said: ‘Look, son, you’ve just been there a short time. Why don’t you give it a try till the end of the term? But if you’re really, really unhappy, pack your bags and I’ll come and get you, or you can go and catch a train.’ That conversation made a huge difference and I felt much happier.

I very quickly realised that I had landed in heaven. Once I got over being away from home, I found out that three times a day, I was going to enjoy what could only be called ‘real food’ after my mother’s poor cooking. As I grew up, I had started putting on weight. By the time I went to Keil at fourteen, I was up to sixteen stone. At one point, it was noted that I was a bit overweight, so I was put on a diet. The cook would bring me something less fattening. This was marvellous, because I’d eat that – and then I’d eat my normal dinner.

The teachers were an interesting bunch. One day, a new master arrived. He came into the classroom and he didn’t say anything. He just went up to this tall teacher’s desk, opened it and took out a nail, about two inches long. Then he got out his strap and hammered the nail into the desk. By the time he had achieved that, the class was sitting in complete silence, mouths open, all thinking the same thing: ‘If he can do that to a nail, what can he do to our hands?’ The standard punishment was to get belted with our hands held out in front of us, two hands crossed together so the strap didn’t hit your inside wrist, causing it to swell up. Despite this threat, he turned out to be a brilliant teacher. He just had the panache to think of a dramatic demonstration to keep us in order.

I was no good at sport. We all had to do PE but there wasn’t much in the way of facilities. We’d go for runs or practise rugby, although I never did know the rules. I was quite big for my age - weight-wise as well - but I still found rugby a bit too much rough and tumble. I’m not really into all of that. To this day, I don’t do any sport. I can remember the Latin master, one frosty day when the ground was rock hard with frost, saying to me: ‘Birrell, dive at the ball.’ And I was looking at him thinking: ‘Are you on drugs? Do you think I’m diving at the ball on concrete?’ Summer holidays were long. We had nine weeks off and, of course, I enjoyed that because it meant I could go off and fly. How did I do at school overall? I tried. I was not bad at history, physics was interesting, and chemistry was okay. Also I was not bad at art. I was dreadful at maths but fortunately, to fly a jet much later in life, all I would need was my three and eight-times tables: the three for altitude for descent planning, and the eight for speed, for example, eight miles per minute.

Mum had a Morris 1100 four-door in which she taught me to drive when I was fifteen. I can still remember driving to Oban in that car. It didn’t seem to bother her in the slightest that it was illegal. I got my first scooter at the age of sixteen. It was a brand new Lambretta, but it wasn’t awfully robust and it kept breaking down. Even today I have a pin in my left arm and my arm won’t straighten. My pal was riding the scooter and I was on the back when he took a corner too fast and we hit a wall. I ended up in hospital and had to spend the night there. I was sixteen. I remember them saying at one point that the pin would come out, but it never has. I could drive a car legally by seventeen, so as soon as my birthday came around, I started driving lessons and passed my test by the end of the month. Dad had lent me Mum’s car to learn in and then, when I passed my test, they bought me a Singer Chamois, a version of the Hillman Imp. Not many boys could drive in the sixth form and none of them had their own car. That car used to drink more oil than fuel and proved to be pretty unreliable. Dad had bought it from a garage in Govan for £175 and I was always very grateful because, despite its unreliability, to me it represented freedom.

Around that time, Mum was saying how disappointed she was that I’d gone to boarding school, on which they had spent a lot of money, and now I had begun misbehaving. By that, I guess she meant I was no longer interested in the church, I was drinking, and I had not done terribly well academically. She felt it had all been a waste of money. I remember saying to her: ‘It wasn’t.’ Because I knew it wasn’t. Keil had actually been the making of me. This school had taken me from someone who was a bit lost in the world, someone with nowhere to go, someone who was a bit fragile, to someone who felt he was on a very progressive journey. My entire last year was really just about waiting to finish, and in the end I didn’t wait for the last day of school before I left. I knew I didn’t need any school qualifications to become a flying instructor.

I’d become aware that some of my chums were starting serious relationships with girls and I wasn’t. Even though I had had my first kiss with a girl from a school in Helensburgh, I had already begun to find out that flying and the world of aviation were much, much simpler activities than girls and relationships. I guess it was a bit unusual that by the time I went to Keil, I had actually started flying lessons. I’d had two lessons before I started at school.

As I walked out of school for the very last time, I thought: ‘I’ll never, ever come back!’ And with a skip in my step, I left Keil behind forever.

Love at first flight

One year, during the school summer holidays, we took one of the old steam trains from Glasgow to London, and then out to Heathrow where we flew to Nice with BEA in a Comet. This was the first time I’d flown. In those days, Comets were used for both long and short-haul flights. Nice was fascinating because there, at the airport, I could watch the Air France Caravelles, with their strange little triangular windows. We did that trip year after year and it was during one of those early trips that I noticed how the runway at Nice ran along the seashore. I’d look out of the Comet window when we landed, looking out to sea.

I can still remember the excitement of those early flying days. Dad would drop us off at the airport, if he could not leave his business, and Nigel, Mum and I would head off on another adventure. Once we flew in the Comet from Heathrow when it had an engine failure while we were in the air and we had to turn back. I had fallen asleep, and I woke up for the landing with Mum explaining: ‘We’re back in London.’

On one departure in a British Eagle Bristol Britannia, it was raining heavily and the pilot did a ‘wet start’, as I now know it to be. I saw this big flame shooting out of the back of the engine, and I was off running down the aisle, shouting something to all the passengers in a panic. The air hostess had to sweep me up and put me back in my seat.

The first time I was allowed to go on to the flight deck was aboard a BEA Vanguard, on our way to London. I was about eight, and I was allowed to go in and see the pilots. I thought: ‘Wow! I want to be a pilot!’ It wasn’t just the aeroplane cockpit that intrigued me; the whole flying environment was very special and exciting. I can still smell the old Viscounts and Vanguards. These days, if we go to Duxford Air Museum and there’s an old Bristol Britannia, a four-engine turboprop, on display, it will still have exactly the same smell I remembered.

Modern jet aircraft somehow have a different kind of smell. It is different but nonetheless exciting. I used to recognise, and be excited by, that smell of burned kerosene.

My auntie used to take Nigel and me on trips to Renfrew Airport. She didn’t drive so she would take us by bus and then, when it closed, to the new airport, Abbotsinch, an old naval station which is now the site of Glasgow International Airport. We’d have lunch there and we would stand for hours and look at the aeroplanes. We’d go up to the desks in the terminal building and ask for little maps and airline flags which were on the counters – BEA, BOAC, Air France, and Swissair. We kept them all in our bedroom.

I had started to build models at about ten, but it was military stuff and I was not so interested in that. To me, it was the airliners I was mad about. I knew the shapes, colours and the names of all of them.

When I reached fourteen, during the summer holiday before starting at Keil, I saw an advert in a newspaper saying ‘Pleasure Flights from Glasgow Airport’. It was with Loganair, a small Scottish airline I eventually flew for many years later. The trouble was, you needed £8 for one flight. So myself and a bunch of pals – about eight of us – decided to put in £1 each and cycle out to the airport. We got there, I said ‘Wait outside’ and I went in to organise whatever I had to do to get us on the aeroplane. I went through the wrong door. It was the Loganair building, but I had walked into the flying club entrance without knowing it. Bold as brass, I went in and said to the first person I saw: ‘I’ve come for a pleasure flight.’ The chap said: ‘We don’t do that. We teach people to fly.’ This struck me like a bolt of lightning. I remember thinking: ‘Teach people to fly!’ As a flying instructor myself, many years later, many kids would walk in, just as I did – and they were a bloody nuisance. But this particular guy was Jim Beaton, who turned out to be the club’s CFI, chief flying instructor. He, more than any other person before or since, was to transform my life. He said: ‘Yes, we teach people to fly here.’ I must have asked some sensible questions after that because he and I chatted for ages. My pals, waiting outside, never did go on a pleasure flight. I asked Jim: ‘How much is it?’ He said it would be £6 or £7 an hour to learn to fly. He showed me around the hangar and the different aircraft – ‘this one is £6 or £7 an hour, this one is £8 an hour’. The first was a Piper Cherokee 140, a single-engined, four-seater aeroplane, and beside it stood a Bolkow Junior, a two-seater.

It was just amazing. Standing next to an aeroplane, I was just blown away. Did I sit in it? Possibly. Jim spent ages with me and explained all the things I would need to learn and what I needed to do. He said you’ve got to be eighteen to join, possibly because the Glasgow Flying Club had a licensed bar. Then he asked me: ‘Are you really, really keen?’ I said: ‘Yes, yes.’ So that night, very kindly, he phoned my father.

After the conversation, Mum and Dad said: ‘Fine, we’ll help you a little bit, but you will have to work for the rest.’ They probably thought: ‘It’s not a bad thing for the boy to be doing.’ Mum, Dad and I met Jim in the Tinto Firs Hotel in Glasgow. Jim was quite a mild man, not a drinker. He explained that I’d get a private pilot’s licence, but I couldn’t go solo until I was seventeen. I was only just fourteen. The meeting with Jim went well, except that when we came back home, Dad said: ‘He’s got short arms and deep pockets’ - Jim hadn’t bought many drinks. I was a bit horrified that Dad was being nasty to my new favourite person in the whole world. What mattered was that Dad had given it his blessing. Because of the bar, I couldn’t join the Glasgow Flying Club, but Jim started the Beaton School of Flying – and I was the only member.

I remember very clearly my very first flight. I was in the left-hand seat – the pilot seat – which is where you sit when you are learning, and Jim was in the right-hand seat. We were in the Cherokee, G-AWEV, and all I could see were dials everywhere. Glasgow is a big, busy airport, so the environment is very controlled and regulated, with lots of talking to air traffic control. Jim was calling for start-up and there was a lot of chatter going on. Of course, I couldn’t understand a word of it. I was sitting on a cushion and realised that to steer the aeroplane on the ground, you had to do it with your feet. I followed through on the take-off with my feet and my hands on the controls. It was joyous and exciting - and just a little bit scary.

We flew off to Loch Lomond, and during that flight Jim let me fly the aeroplane in a straight line, straight and level, then a bit of turning. I built up to this nice and slowly. He showed what would happen if I lifted or lowered the nose. And then I was sick! No doubt it was a bit choppy and the next thing I knew, I was throwing up. I threw up every time I went flying. Jim had to clean up after his star pupil had pedalled off home on his bike. Eventually, he told me to clean up the aeroplane myself!

Of course, things got a whole lot more exciting after I met Jim Beaton. From that moment, my whole life changed dramatically and I wanted to spend as much time at the airport as I could. That long holiday of 1969 was a turning point in my life. I was starting my new school in September and I was quite happy that whatever happened from now on, my life was not going to be just more of the same. At the flying club, I had become a bit like the club mascot. My exploits were even written about in a Scottish newspaper. There was an elderly gentleman who had been involved in motor racing and flown Tiger Moths back in the 1930s. The article was about the youngest pilot – me – and the oldest pilot in Scotland.

There were two flying clubs at Glasgow airport: the GFC and the West of Scotland Flying Club. The Glasgow Flying Club flew Piper Cherokees and the other club had Cessnas. The Cherokee was a low-winged aircraft and the Cessna a high wing. At that time, 1968/69, the Cherokee was quite a new aeroplane, not that I knew it at the time. They also used to have a Piper Tri-Pacer, which had a tricycle undercarriage and a high wing, but the Cherokee was the next generation. So there were a couple of Cherokees, a Bolkow Junior, which was a bit tatty, and other aeroplanes which came and went over time. I would fly an hour every two weeks to begin with, but I was taken up on lots of other people’s flights. If someone went flying, they would say I could sit in the back. We’d fly down to Prestwick and would sit on the grass and sunbathe and watch everything going on around us – you can’t do that now.

I spent every moment I could at the club, just listening to the pilots talking about aviation. When Flight International came out, a weekly aviation magazine, at the back there were advertisements for different flying jobs. We would wander over to the terminal to get a copy, then sit in the coffee bar and I would listen to the other pilots talking about all sorts of things: everything from Robbie Hunter’s favourite shape of women’s breasts – which I remember him drawing on a board – to the best short field take-off technique. Robbie went through pilot training with the RAF and was offered a navigator’s course, but turned it down. That was quite common in those days. I guess it depended on the RAF’s requirement at the time, but he certainly did fly Jet Provosts at one stage during his pilot training, so he was a sort of god, as far as I was concerned. He had his CPL/IR - his commercial pilot’s licence and instrument rating.

Ray Connolly was a private pilot and also an air traffic control assistant. All these men were extremely interested in flying, but from different backgrounds, and they would invite me along because they knew I was passionate about flying.

Jim and I flew across to Edinburgh once, and after landing someone told Jim off because we had not joined the circuit properly (a circuit comprises of designated routes to be flown visually for take-off and landing). We had apparently joined on the wrong side, and Jim said: ‘I was asleep, it wasn’t me.’ He pointed to this fifteen-year-old boy – me! Scotland’s airspace was mostly unregulated at that time. There was

almost no controlled airspace, other than upper airways which we were not allowed into, and couldn’t reach anyway. Even Aberdeen and Inverness were in uncontrolled airspace. Edinburgh, Glasgow and Prestwick were, but that was about it. And because it is such an open country, and because there’s not that much flying going on, it is unlikely that people on the ground would get annoyed with light aircraft overhead. I became a bit of a hooligan in later years with an aeroplane. In those days, I was still just a young person learning to fly, and we would go to Mull, about an hour and a bit away. It was a fabulous flight because you’d fly down the Clyde, over the Crinan Canal, pass the Corryvreckan Whirlpool and then up the coast, towards Oban, and across and down the Sound of Mull. Mull was a lovely island with a wonderful airfield called Glenforsa, a little grass airstrip between the hotel of the same name and the Sound of Mull. The airstrip was right on the shore, running east-west.

The Glenforsa Hotel was about halfway along the strip, and you could taxi up a wee hill and park by it. Behind the hotel was a glen, going up into the hills, and that caused a lot of problems because if the wind was going up or down the glen, it came right through the middle of the strip. So quite often the windsocks at each end of the runway would be pointing in opposite directions – not what a pilot wants to see.

It meant it was quite an awkward place to land. The strip sloped down to the sea, so the aircraft, if you let it do what it wanted, would gently turn down towards the sea. The grass, when wet, didn’t give much traction, and awkward winds could give you a tailwind on landing and a headwind up the other end. Occasionally, there would be a very awkward crosswind to contend with. So, unsurprisingly, there used to be quite a few prangs on Mull. The club introduced a rule that you had to have a checkout by an instructor.

People would fly up from England because they had booked into the hotel, which was in a fantastic location. It was a modern Scandinavian log building owned by the Howitt family. Old man Howitt was an

engineer who, it was said, had played a leading part in building the early stages of the M1. The Howitts had three offspring who were all older than me, two boys and a girl.

David Howitt was the youngest son. The strip was operated