Just as I settled down today with my sunday morning coffe, Facebook chucked up a memory from five years ago:

That was me on my first formal flying lesson!

11 months later I’d passed all the ground school exams, passed the GST (General Skills Test), completed the solo navigation flights, and had my shiny new pilots licence:

Following on from that, a few things developed:

Aircraft Syndicate – originally I bought a 1/3rd share in the plane. One syndicate member decided to move to Norway (as you do!) so his share was up for sale. At the time, there weren’t that many students coming through the club, and that share was still up for sale a year later. Then the other syndicate member suddenly decided they wanted to sell their share too.

Now apparently, according the syndicate rules (there are always rules!!) that would trigger the sale of the aircraft. I would get my share of the final sale price – but that would leave me looking for another share in a different one.

I really like G-TM, I know it inside out, and trust it. So after much discussion with my wife, I decided to buy out both of the syndicate members – and that went ahead pretty quickly.

So now I’m the sole owner – on the plus side, no-one else flies it, only me! On the down side, all the costs that were previously shared 3 ways are now solely mine!

BMAA Aircraft Inspector – A call went out to club members – would any be interested in training to be an Inspector? We had 2 inspectors at the airflield, but we have a LOT of planes – and they were struggling to keep up with the permits – and it only took one to be unavailable to really screw things up.

I’m fascinated by these apparently simple aircraft (the devil is in the detail of course!) and started training. It took around a year, and LOTS of inspections, and I finally became a qualified Inspector, under the BMAA (British Microlight Aircraft Association) – who operate the Microlight class of aircraft regulation on behalf of the CAA.

That is a truly fascinating – and challenging – part of my whole flying life – and as I get more experienced with the aircraft, I’m now starting to pick up some (limited!) repair work too.

Conclusion? Apart from a general conslusion on “Wow, time flies” the 5 year thing is something that always bugged the hell out of me at work when a boss would ask me “where do you see yourself in 5 years?” and I feel I may as well be being asked to stare into a crystal ball and just take a wild guess!