Final Approach: My Father and Other Turbulence

By Mark Blackburn

Final Approach charts the turbulent flightpath between a jetsetting father and a planespotting son.

The 1970s were the final gasp of the Golden Age of Flying. Mark Blackburn grew up amidst this fuel-guzzling splendour, with airports his playground of choice. He came to adulthood well-heeled and well-travelled. How

• Language: English
• Publisher: Claret Press
• Release date: Nov 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9781910461754

Mark Blackburn

Mark, the oldest of four children, arrived in London during the heyday of punk to study at the LSE. Sundry abortive attempts at stardom followed: a stand-up comedian, actor and musician.After a successful career as a shoe-seller, Mark left London and now lives in Somerset, England, doingwhat he loves best - writing. Dame Margaret Drabble selected Mark as runner-up in the Interact Ruth Rendell Short Story Prize, saying how much she loved and related to his story, The Wall. He was also shortlisted for the 2022 TLC Pen Factor Pitch Prize.Mark has had other short stories, poetry, nonfiction publishing in print and online. He is the author of two children's books. When he isn't writing, he may well be found under the bonnet of an old car trying to coax it back to life on a classic car rally.

Book preview

Take-Off

The games pitches behind the boarding houses on the hilltop were called ‘Wilderness’, for good reason. The boys were shepherded into position along the touchline by the Housemaster. And then we waited.

On this drizzly, sullen 70s day, out of the east a buzzing speck appeared and grew larger. It was a small helicopter, more a tangle of glass and tubes than any integrated machine. It was coming towards us, on the descent; no one knew who was inside. Its forward progress halted at the centre of the pitch. It hovered for a moment, the chopping whirr of the engine faltered, and the helicopter dropped slowly to the ground. The whine subsided, the blades slowed until they were individually discernible, then they too stopped. There was complete silence; the boys, the helicopter, the world. After a few moments, the side of the glass canopy cracked open, and out climbed a tall man in a long black coat with an astrakhan fur collar. My father.

The Housemaster stepped forward to shake hands. The other boys were allowed to disperse, and my father and I went to take tea with Mr Norwood. Afterwards I was told to fetch my things and then we went back to the helicopter. No crowd in formal attendance this time, although once I’d climbed in beside him and he’d started the engine, a steady flow emerged to watch our departure.

No sooner had we taken off than the low cloud curdled down to suck us up; the already poor weather was deteriorating. My father was no expert pilot, quite the opposite – he’d only just got his licence and this was his maiden solo flight. He had no experience of instrument flying. He flew by visual flight rules, and therefore was totally dependent on what his eyes could tell him, or in this case, our eyes. The cloud ceiling was about 500 feet, barely higher than the electricity pylons puncturing the skin of the flowing Berkshire countryside. All he could do was use the compass and head east, flirting with the base of the cloud while praying that he was above the wires and turrets, and able to react in time to any sudden rise in the terrain. I had instructions to watch out for these hazards, as well as any other craft also foolish enough to fly in the conditions, and any landmark that might help to guide us. Then I had to shout at him over the crackly intercom and tell him, the cockpit being too noisy for us to hear each other naturally despite being only inches apart.

He flew as slowly as he could without stalling the helicopter, a very basic Bell 47, just our two seats side by side in the glass bubble. The tension was as thick as the cloud, our progress negligible. Nothing familiar below, just field after field, lane after lane, the occasional higher ground or communications mast to swerve around. Then a miracle: we passed over a runway, the husks of three ancient helicopters, one of which was a skeletal 1950s Westland Dragonfly, ominously lined up at one end.

We set down on the grass on the other side of the tarmac strip. More by luck than judgement, my father managed to make contact with the control tower over the airband radio, and it turned out we’d come down at Blackbushe Airport in Surrey – at the wrong end of the runway away from the tower and the basic terminal. We’d already been incredibly lucky even to get to the airfield, and we were lucky that due to the weather it was closed, so there’d been no aircraft movements on the runway. Luckier still that a few staff remained in the control tower, vainly awaiting an improvement in the weather. My father fired up again, and under their guidance we taxied up the runway from our isolated spot and parked beside the terminal. Nobody said anything as we trooped in to report our arrival, but my embarrassed teenage self could tell they thought we were idiots who were lucky to be alive.

We sat there for several awkward hours in one of those lounges with furniture no one would ever buy for themselves – battered wooden foam-cushioned chairs with peeling covers and chipped coffee tables littered with aviation magazines. A couple of bored air traffic controllers across the counter listened to their crackling radios and looked out into the wet grey blanket. Would the weather break to allow us to take off again? It finally did; a mere ten minutes later we arrived at our original planned destination, Fairoaks Airfield at the other end of Surrey.

We swapped our seats in the helicopter for those of our waiting car, with me receiving explicit instructions to keep my mouth shut and let my father explain to my mother why we were several hours late home.

Every flight with my father should have carried a health warning, but I took no heed. Flights, literal and metaphorical, they were all risky. At that age, I had an excuse, I was still in the unqualified worship phase. I have less of an excuse for repeating the mistake in my adult years.

LHR

My flight to Cork’s been delayed, just for a change. I’m sat at the gate in the new section of Heathrow’s Terminal 1 watching the planes and drinking my mochaccino. I realise I could have been sitting in this exact location years ago, grid reference TQ 07764 75364, on the verge of my teens. Except then I wouldn’t have been in the terminal. I’d have been on top of it, sitting on the roof of the Queen’s Building, a seaside pier in the middle of an airport, and I’d have been holding a pair of binoculars, not a cup of coffee. Now I’m a businessman in my own right, amassing air miles on my travels. Trying to compete with my father? At least I chose a different trade – shoes not cars.

Back then, home was a ten-minute drive from Windsor, where my brother and I could get the 727 Green Line coach to Heathrow; the child fare was a few shillings. Either we’d walk a couple of miles to catch the bus into Windsor or pester our mother to take us there. She probably didn’t mind, two preteen boys out of her hair for the day. My father would have been away, probably with that German mistress, all those years before we knew about her, on one of his frequent and often lengthy business trips. Maybe we were so interested in the planes because we thought they might bring our father back. Looking back, I realise I’ve always been a hoarder, trying to save the pieces of a lost childhood. I started collecting plane numbers to ascribe some sort of order in the world – if I could write down every number of every plane, everything would be under control, wouldn’t it? It wasn’t just the numbers. I had over a thousand airliner postcards.

We’d pack our kitbags, the most essential item a packed lunch: cheese sandwich, bottle of Cresta (it’s frothy, man) and a banana, which made the cheese sandwich taste of banana too, especially if it was a hot day and we let everything mush up in the bottom of the bag. The treat was a Jacob’s Club biscuit – favourite plain chocolate or mint, least favourite orange, though that was still okay. Every now and then you’d get one where the biscuit hadn’t been inserted in the manufacturing process. Result, a solid block of chocolate, and life didn’t get any better than that.

In too went the planespotter’s tools: air band radio, log books and binoculars, to read the aircraft registrations. To misquote The Smiths, some numbers were bigger than others. Surprisingly, the Soviet ones were easiest to read, with CCCP 86607 or similar in big characters on the side of the plane, whereas an American airliner might have a tiny N747PA tucked up by the tail.

The radio was just a fall-back, in case we couldn’t read the reg numbers or ‘cops’, as we called them. As in Did you cop that number? I suppose, when a plane flew overhead. Their markings were also etched under the wings and sometimes visible even without the binos (by-nose) if the planes were landing over us. Once a year a specialist publisher issued a volume with all the airliner registrations listed, and our purpose in life was to underline all the ones we saw, trying to fill up the book.

The radio looked like any other but alongside the usual medium and long wave you could listen to conversations between the pilots and air traffic control on VHF. So if you missed ‘copping’ a number with the binoculars, you might hear the pilot speaking to the tower, announcing his flight details. If we got bored watching and listening to the planes – and I admit, we sometimes did, it could seem an age between one landing and the next – these radios could also pick up emergency service broadcasts. Juliet Bravo, break-in at Thresher’s off-licence, Great West Road…

Fully equipped for our mission, we’d set off on a Green Line coach, but really just a single decker bus, which meandered up to Heathrow through Slough, Langley and Iver rather than the recently extended M4 motorway. Once we arrived, we’d go to the Queen’s Building, the labyrinthine rooftop terrace straddling Terminals One and Two. Back then it was very simple – there were three terminals, One for domestic, i.e. within the UK, Two for European and Three for long haul. There may have been some discussion about a possible fourth terminal, but there was certainly no hint of a fifth one, and the idea of a third runway laying waste several nearby villages was still in the ether.

The Queen’s Building was a throwback to a more innocent age, a seaside pier in the middle of the airport where the planespotters were outnumbered by friends and families waving off or welcoming travellers. Those expecting passengers would wait until they saw the right plane touch down, often under the guidance of a friendly spotter, and then they’d rush down to the terminal to be in place to greet their people before they’d collected their baggage and come through passport control. Now with the need for commercial use of every square inch of airport real estate and the disproportionate fear of a terrorist attack, everyone’s insulated from the planes, except the actual passengers. They are spat out from or spilled into the fuselage of an aircraft they never even see the outside of, once they’ve passed through the snakes and ladders of the terminal escalators and walkways.

But as we passed whole days on the terraces, we lived and breathed kerosene. Not just looking at the planes, but revelling in the throb and rumble as the planes landed and took off. When landing, thrust reversers screeched as pilots urged their aircraft to a stop. Taking off they’d make even more noise, every inch of throttle needed to get a hundred-ton metal tube stuffed with hordes of people and their paraphernalia into the air. Nothing eclipsed the sheer thunder of Concorde, the afterburners throwing flames as the albatross of a plane straightened its long-pointed beak and left the ground. The smell too – a pervasive fug of burnt fuel.

Why the seaside pier as destination of choice for a young planespotter? Well, it was all open to the elements, and there were little cafes and shops, and photo and recording booths. It was a rare day that we didn’t take home a set of mugshots of us pulling faces or a cheap piece of vinyl recording some unlistenable din we’d made, loosely based on a current Beatles or Stones hit. There was a camaraderie among the planespotters, and if we missed catching a number somebody would volunteer the info. Happy days.

Happier days than those during term-time, anyway. We could still planespot, but it was… complicated. My boarding school was in the lea of Windsor Castle, on the flightpath, so that worked, sometimes. When the winds were westerly (they usually were), the planes took off over us, and passed too high for easy recognition. Either they disappeared into small black dots arcing their way across the Atlantic or skewered outwards to closer destinations. The planes ascended and descended into the wind to minimise the length of runway needed; a strong wind can halve the amount of runway needed for a safe touchdown. But sometimes on mild summer nights, in a light south-easterly breeze, the planes tangled with the turrets of the castle as instead they came in over us towards the capital. They seemed to fly so slowly as to question the laws of flight; flaps stuttering down, nose up.

The most significant obstacle to planespotting at school was a teacher, Mr B, who taught history and supervised rugby. He can only have been in his thirties, but was bald apart from a few long and wild wisps Bobby Charlton-style. He wore wire-rimmed thick-lensed spectacles. He didn’t look the most frightening or threatening master, and apart from a large stomach, there wasn’t that much to him.

History lessons were punctuated by the occasional piece of chalk, or worse, a board duster – a wooden thing about the size of