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Golden Days
Thumbing through a folder some years back in another futile attempt to organise my filing cabinet, I came across a carefully stored certificate. It had not seen the light of day for some time, but it was instantly recognisable by the wings that adorned its upper edge as my ‘First Solo Certificate’. With a rope-like border and an instructor’s signature penned across its face, one particular feature leapt out at me; the date. Whilst the day and month were just around the corner, the year was another matter. After some quick arithmetic, the significance of the date became more substantial, it was nearly twenty five years since I had gone ‘solo’.
What a great story Owen! I always love hearing about professional pilots; how they transitioned from flying their exciting, new, single engine planes... to flying multi-million dollar machines! I can't wait to read your novel. I plan on writing a review of the book once I get the chance to read it! You've had some pretty unique experiences throughout your life, I can't wait to read about some of them! You certainly know you've had an interesting life if you can write a book about it.
I want to recommend readers to check out more about Owen and his novels on his website: www.owenzupp.com I have my copy of "50 Tales of Flight" and will be publishing a review sometime soon, once I have some more free time!
Thanks again for writing in and participating in the Share Your Story section of the blog,
Swayne Martin
Martins Aviation / From Private to Professional Pilot
Owen Zupp is a
published author with nearly 17,000 hours of varied flight experience. His
background ranges from charter work and flight instruction and to ferry flights,
flight testing and the airlines. He has also served as both a Chief Pilot and
Chief Flying Instructor. With 20 years in airline operations, Owen has flown
both domestically and across the globe from his Australian base. He holds a
Masters Degree in Aviation Management and writings on aviation have been
published around the world and received various accolades and awards. In 2007
his first book, Down to Earth, was published and traces the combat experiences
of a WWII RAF fighter pilot. Today, he is remains a current airline pilot and
passionate aviation writer with a best-selling eBook, “50 Tales of Flight” and
an upcoming title, “Solo Flight. Australia”.
Owen flying the Citation Sovereign for a magazine flight review
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Golden Days
An Excerpt from the Amazon
Best-Seller, ’50 Tales of Flight’
By Owen Zupp
Thumbing through a folder some years back in another futile attempt to organise my filing cabinet, I came across a carefully stored certificate. It had not seen the light of day for some time, but it was instantly recognisable by the wings that adorned its upper edge as my ‘First Solo Certificate’. With a rope-like border and an instructor’s signature penned across its face, one particular feature leapt out at me; the date. Whilst the day and month were just around the corner, the year was another matter. After some quick arithmetic, the significance of the date became more substantial, it was nearly twenty five years since I had gone ‘solo’.
Could that be
right? A quarter of a century? I pondered the concept for a moment. Twenty five
years can mean many things to many people. It can be a landmark of marriage for
a happy couple or an inconceivable eon to a school student in their final year.
As a parent, it’s a blink. To a pilot it can be just another coincidence of
numbers, volumes of which have already been carefully inked into a series of
treasured log books.
Video made by Owen Zupp
For some reason
this alignment of the calendar had struck a sentimental chord in me.
Certificate in hand, I sat at my desk and reflected on where the time might
have gone. It wasn’t long before the blanks were filled in with a sea of
memories and the trace of a grin gathered at the corner of my mouth.
In my mind’s eye
I can still see the ground at Camden Airport falling away as the Cessna 152
leapt into the air, unburdened by my absent mentor in the right hand seat.
Climbing away from runway 06, I was squinting into the morning sun as 17
year-olds didn’t generally wear sunglasses back then. Wheeling ‘Mike Alpha Whisky’
onto the downwind leg and having time to realise that I was all alone. And
loving it. With the checks complete, the base turn came too soon and it was
time to ready the aeroplane for the approach. Managing the intricacies of
speed, flap, power and trim, I rolled onto final to be greeted by the welcoming
runway. The clearance to land crackled through the overhead speaker and I
reached down to quickly acknowledge with the hand microphone. (Headsets were
for airline pilots!) Down to earth again, but my life was changed forever. As a
schoolboy, excitement overwhelmed any sense of significance.
The Boeing 737 Owen Now Flies
Owen's "Office"
Since that clear
and calm summer morning, I have been very fortunate to fly a variety of
machines and meet an even wider array of interesting people, some of whom have
unfortunately not survived the aviator’s journey. Flight offers so much to we
mere mortals, from simple pleasures to immense exhilaration and the darkest
nights to the most remarkable dawns. Sometimes we take it for granted as
complacency walks hand in hand with the human condition.
For my part, I
was always going to fly. My Dad had flown all manner of aircraft from Mustangs
and Meteors to Cessnas and Super Connies. He’d flown in combat over 200 times
and later in life spent numerous midnight hours relaying the sick and injured
in the NSW Air Ambulance ‘Queen Airs’. The warbling of ‘out of synch’
propellers overhead was our signal that Dad would be home soon. As a kid, I
would loiter around airports at every opportunity, scrounging rides where
possible. There was no barbed wire or security fence to stop curious kids like
me clambering up onto wing roots and gawking at cockpits through cupped hands.
We were hangar rats and the hangars were full of cheese. Back at home, I would
perch on our garage roof with binoculars and scan above for all and sundry as
they criss-crossed the sky.
When it came my
turn to learn to fly, I found a job as a paramedic that paid relatively well
and afforded me enough time off to fly and study. At the time it felt like the
Department of Health should simply directly credit my pay to the flying school
accounts. Believe it or not, $47/hour private hire for a Tomahawk was quite an
amount. With Dad as my instructor, my first school was the now-defunct Sydney
Airways before moving to the now-defunct Royal Aero Club of NSW. Early starts
and frost-covered windscreens were preceded by briefings in our garage at home.
My working week revolved around my flying and when navigation exercises came
into play, the anticipation was almost unbearable. Mum would pack us up with
sandwiches and a Thermos of tea and we would venture to exotic locations like
Coolah, Taree or Tamworth, navigating by charts that back then didn’t cost a
cent and landing without incurring an invoice. As I shared my sandwich and Dad
his wisdom, I didn’t realise how golden these days were. He would die of cancer
within five years.
Owen with a friend and a Mustang
To be paid to
fly was unfathomable, yet that’s just what the Royal Aero Club did for me as a
lowly Grade 3 Instructor. Pulling out six Piper Tomahawks in early morning
darkness and fuelling them one by one was a small price to pay to be allowed to
fly for a living. Paid a salary and flying around ninety hours a month of
single-hour lessons, my fellow instructor, Roland Parker, and I thought we’d
died and gone to heaven. To simply get a slot in the training circuit, you’d
await the control tower’s call to the office to tell you when to start up and
taxi, before shutting down in the run-up bay and waiting again, this time for a
‘green light’ from the tower. Finally, you’d get in the air. To see the
veritable ghost town that Bankstown has now become borders on heart-breaking.
Today we drive around a cyclone-fenced perimeter and where a sea of aeroplanes
once sat, now only grass grows. The social hub of the old Aero Club where
engineers and pilots would gather has been demolished. These are indeed very
different times.
From instructing
at Bankstown I went wandering to the north-west, to the Kimberleys and the
beautiful land that is the Australian outback. There were scenic flight swarms
over the Bungle Bungles and lone charters to all corners of the Northern
Territory and Western Australia. Pre-dawn pre-flights were performed to the
amazing backdrop of vast electrical storms over the Timor Sea and torrential
downpours that changed the face of the scenery from wasteland to waterfalls in
minutes. Along with the other young pilots, we made mistakes and learnt
valuable lessons each day before retiring to the Argyle Tavern; it was
paradise.
Owen with a Cessna 337 as a young charter pilot in outback Australia
The beautiful
Australian outback is only one of nature’s canvases that I’ve been privileged
to experience. New Guinea’s lush highlands and interesting airstrips, some
still covered in World War II Pierced-Steel-Planking made up only part of the
challenge; the rapidly changing weather being the other. Drinking from coconuts
and boiling rice and fresh eel on the water’s edge near Balimo. Ferrying an
Islander aircraft to the tiny island of Yap in Micronesia and passing the
numerous shallow atolls, complete with wrecked and rusting vessels caught on
their barbs. Clambering over bullet-riddled Japanese Zeros and ferreting out an
inverted Grumman Hellcat, now overgrown by vines.
Yap, Micronesia
From the flight
levels there has been the rugged, war-torn landscape of Afghanistan and the
frozen earth around Stalingrad where farmers somehow eke out a harvest each
year. At 60 degrees south, icebergs float by day and the Southern Lights dance
by night like an electric green curtain. Descending over Europe at dawn to
break clear over the Thames and the city of London cannot help but remind one
of those brave crews who limped home along the same route over sixty years ago
with no Flight Management System to guide them. The lava flows of the Hawaiian
Islands glowing by night and the US west coast illuminated by the spectacular
efflux of a rocket launched out of Vandenberg.
Excitedly
watching the world rocket by on my first flight in a 737, or the world spin
around through the bubble canopy of a Mustang. Thoughtfully waltzing my Tiger
Moth around the Glasshouse Mountains on the way to Toowoomba, my Dad’s hometown
and final resting place. Flight can be as diverse as the scenery we gaze down
upon and the people we meet.
There have been
less than picturesque moments too; a magneto blowing off my Cessna 310 before
diverting into Meekatharra, a cylinder-head separating on a Cessna 210 and
limping home to Kununurra, a forced landing near Kanangra Walls in the Blue
Mountains and a free ride home in the Careflight helicopter. Watching the
demise of institutions like the Royal Aero Club of NSW and Ansett Airlines,
whose pilot’s wings and memories I still treasure. These hurdles along the way
were the pot-holes on what has predominantly been a great road and has added
character to the journey. They are also reminders that the road should be
driven with due respect. That degree of respect should always be the same, be
it a Beechcraft or a Boeing. It’s a small price to pay for such a great
privilege.
Cylinder-head separating on a Cessna 210 and limping home to Kununurra
Twenty five
years may sound like an eon; but it’s a snapshot. There is still so much to see
and do and there is no vantage point superior to that of the cockpit. It is a
viewpoint for all of us to cherish. In the years to come, it is a world I will
share with my children, as my father did with me.
So how did I
celebrate the anniversary? I went flying. Away from home, I dawdled into a
flying school in Queensland and became the student once more. My competency on
the Piper Tomahawk was checked out over the scenic Sunshine Coast and in the
rather gusty circuit. The instructor beside me wasn’t born when my aviation
trek began at Camden, but his youth offered a sense of continuity to the whole
process. It was all ahead of him still and I envied that a little. As he
climbed out, locked the door and gave me the ‘thumbs up’, it was reminiscent of
a scene I had been lucky enough to offer my students many times before.
Solo once again,
I lapped the circuit and looked at the world with eyes of that eager 17
year-old, briefly pondering the 25 years still to come. The crackle of the
headset, the straining windsock and the welcoming strip of asphalt blend into
the challenge of landing that has not faded with time. A challenge that is
always relished by those who fly.
Owen and the plane which he flew solo around Australia
The route of Owen's solo flight around Australia
The joy of
flying has lost none of its charm for me. The sights, sounds and sense of
freedom; it is hard imagining life without it. We who aviate are very fortunate
and flight is something we should always share and treasure. It doesn’t matter
which aircraft, weather or setting, when the earth falls away from the wheels,
life is good.
In “50 Tales of Flight”, the reader is not simply taken
aloft in everything from biplanes to Boeings as the title may suggest. True,
the flight deck door has been cracked ajar and the canvas cover pulled back
from the open cockpit, but this book is built from the ground up. From the
alarm clock buzzing to begin the airline pilot’s day to the sound of silence
when a light aircraft engine fails and all that lies beneath are trees and
cliffs.
There are moments of tension and others of humorous relief to be found amongst this collection of stories from the author’s thirty years aloft. Interspersed are tales of other aviators too. Veterans of wars now passed and some who lost their lives pursuing their passion.
There are images of the sights and people contained within the words. In some ways this book tracks an aviation life, but in others it offers insights and inspiration; just as the sky itself does. For anyone interested in aviation, or just intrigued by this seemingly removed field of endeavour, there is much to be seen through these “50 Tales of Flight”.
There are moments of tension and others of humorous relief to be found amongst this collection of stories from the author’s thirty years aloft. Interspersed are tales of other aviators too. Veterans of wars now passed and some who lost their lives pursuing their passion.
There are images of the sights and people contained within the words. In some ways this book tracks an aviation life, but in others it offers insights and inspiration; just as the sky itself does. For anyone interested in aviation, or just intrigued by this seemingly removed field of endeavour, there is much to be seen through these “50 Tales of Flight”.
What a great story Owen! I always love hearing about professional pilots; how they transitioned from flying their exciting, new, single engine planes... to flying multi-million dollar machines! I can't wait to read your novel. I plan on writing a review of the book once I get the chance to read it! You've had some pretty unique experiences throughout your life, I can't wait to read about some of them! You certainly know you've had an interesting life if you can write a book about it.
I want to recommend readers to check out more about Owen and his novels on his website: www.owenzupp.com I have my copy of "50 Tales of Flight" and will be publishing a review sometime soon, once I have some more free time!
Thanks again for writing in and participating in the Share Your Story section of the blog,
Swayne Martin
Martins Aviation / From Private to Professional Pilot
Twitter: @MartinsAviation
