My gliding club friend, having finished her Open University studies, is returning to normal sociability. She invited husband and me, along with several others from gliding days for lunch on what must have been the first warm Sunday of the year.
Her dog, Hendrix, hid in the shade beneath our table, while we compared notes on our now grown children, our waning careers, and pension prospects. the mortgages we've paid off, and the 16% interest rates we started with. Gliding we hardly mentioned, apart from remembering the scandal when an early solo pilot misjudged his height so badly that he failed to return to the air-field, attempted to land on a local parade ground, yet was so low he missed that too, and as he glided into a street, wrapped the K7 glider round a lamp post so that his cockpit nose ended up in the first floor bathroom of a local house, whence the owner dragged him to safety.
It was a memorably embarrassing incident at a politically difficult time because the MOD was trying to sell the airfield, and despite a question about our airfield's safety consequently being asked in Parliament, the incident was effectively hushed up, forgotten and the airfield sold. But, though we didn't know the culprit, we were all ab-initios or early solo pilots too at the time, and we remember it. I expect culprit and house-owner remember it too - a talking point for their Sunday reminiscences.
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| Photo (by Terry Morgan) from the local paper 1982. |
