The Sky Is Not The Limit: The Life of Australia's Top Gun

By Matt Hall and David Lyall

The action-packed true story of Australia's very own top gun pilot, Matt Hall.
"I would sit there at the controls and think: I'm going to go left, and I can. I want to go right, and I will. I don't have to follow the road. I don't have to follow rules. I don't have to ask anyone - I can go left when I want, I can go right when I want. I had discovered the freedom that has kept me flying to this day." Since he was old enough to notice planes, Matt Hall wanted to be a pilot. Flying with his Dad in a glider, making models at home and meeting officers from the Air Force fuelled his ambition. So when he was accepted into the RAAF's grueling training school it seemed a dream come true. But dreams take hard work and focus - and the willingness to make your own luck. From the rigours of his first professional job as a top Gun fighter in the Battle of Baghdad where he experienced extreme fear and loss for the first time, to his post Air Force career as a professional racer where he has survived near fatal situations to become one of the most renowned pilots in the world, Matt Hall has led an extraordinary life. His story is a rare glimpse into a normally closed world where skill, quick thinking and a cool head can mean the difference between life and death. 'A must read for anyone interested in flying' COURIER MAIL

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Feb 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781743096789

Matt Hall

Matt Hall is a highly decorated and skilled pilot with over 1500 Hornet hours, 500 hours in the F-15E Strike Eagle (including combat), over 700 hours in light aircraft and over 500 hours doing aerobatics.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

My life in eight seconds …

Things were starting to get pretty hectic as the US$100 million F-15E Strike Eagle I was flying got closer to Baghdad and Saddam Hussein’s Super Missile Engagement Zone. ‘The Super Mez’, as it was known, was supposedly the Iraqi dictator’s impenetrable shield above the city and at that time, in March 2003, was considered the most dangerous piece of airspace on the planet.

I was and still am the only Australian to ever fly an F-15 in combat — I was on exchange with the US Air Force when Operation Iraqi Freedom broke out, and they seemed to think I was the man for this job. And so there I was, in the thick of it all, operating the world’s most powerful and effective airborne strike weapon.

The night sortie hadn’t gone as planned for a multitude of reasons, and I had a fair bit more on my very large plate than I’d bargained for. It wasn’t that I didn’t think I could handle the situation; it was just that I could tell something was not right.

My ‘back seat’ — the guy who was in the cockpit with me as my tactical eyes on the world — was not pulling his weight. He called it a bad day. I called it the start of a nightmare. I felt like I was out there alone. Then, 10 miles from the heavily armed area of downtown Baghdad, I saw something that scared the hell out of me.

I had the plane in a right-hand turn and as I was scanning below, looking out for threats, I saw a bright, intense light. It was almost like when you see an arc welder for the first time: the light appeared as a point on the ground and then started to move forwards and plume. I had no doubt whatsoever that it was a missile. As I watched it, the bright light began to accelerate along my flightpath and grow.

The atmosphere on our two-aircraft mission (and especially inside my plane) was already at a low point. And it plummeted when my back seat said, with a lazy Texan drawl, ‘Looks like there’s somethin’ comin’ up at us.’

No shit, mate! Is that the best you can offer? Just revisiting that moment still sends shivers up my spine.

If I hadn’t had a few other things to take care of — like saving our collective lives — I might have unstrapped myself, dived over my seat and throttled the guy.

I had to remain calm and in control. Yet as I looked at this missile climbing rapidly towards us, I still had no missile launch indications inside the cockpit. None of the high-tech computers had picked it up; there were no warning bells. But I knew for sure what it was. Things were suddenly serious.

A fighter pilot’s first priority in this kind of situation is to figure out what exactly the missile is doing. And this is the moment when a lifetime spent flying planes — lots of planes — the years in fighter pilot courses and undertaking Fighter Combat Instructor training (Australia’s version of Top Gun school), is about to pay dividends. Forget the hours upon hours when you’ve had to sacrifice social activity in order to study and learn, and study some more — this is the be all and end all. Basically, this is what keeps us alive.

So I tested the missile by conducting a tight turn, changing direction rapidly by 30 degrees … The missile turned too. That sealed it — this missile was on me.

Even in an era when any kid with a game console can pretend to be in the same situation, a circumstance like this can only be understood by someone who has actually been there and done it for real. Someone who has flown in combat and been fired upon. All of a sudden your life changes and you know that this missile is coming to kill you. I had no choice but to go into ‘nothing else matters’ mode, where my sole purpose for the following seven to eight seconds was to live.

My next move was to reverse the aircraft’s turn — now banking hard to the left — and pick up the missile down that side of the plane. The move was not designed to defeat the missile at this stage, but to reduce its energy. The theory is that the target continually makes the missile turn so the threat runs out of energy, almost like a runaway rugby player with only the fullback to beat stepping left then right, left then right until the fullback — the last line of defence — can no longer make the tackle. Except in combat, in the fighter-pilot scenario, it’s life or death. And it’s all happening in milliseconds.

I started doing distance assessment and putting chaff and flares out into the air to test the missile’s guidance system. I had no way of knowing whether it was a heat-guided weapon or radar-guided. The expendables we let fly in these situations are an attempt to decoy either type of missile.

I continued on this hard left turn for two to three seconds, and the missile continued with me. It had to be climbing incredibly fast. I couldn’t actually see it climbing, but I could see it moving left and right across the ground.

Based on my timing and assessments, my guess was we were three or four seconds from impact. Again I reversed the turn, with a plan that this new right-hand turn would be my last move before I’d go into my manoeuvre to defeat the missile.

My aim was to stop it from hitting our plane — naturally. But I also had to prevent it from getting too close, otherwise its prox fuses could detonate and in turn destroy the F-15E with debris. As I turned back to the right, I looked again for the missile, and at that point I couldn’t see it. Not a word had been said in the cockpit since my back-seater’s ill-considered observation earlier on.

The missile was in its final stages of flight — its rocket motor had burnt out and it was effectively a very high-speed guided projectile. Because it was night, and it now had no rocket plume out the back, it was invisible to me.

So now I was going off timing, instinct and gut feel.

I began my final manoeuvre — basically a very aggressive barrel roll. My hand reached down to jettison all our bombs, weapons and external fuel tanks, in order to get rid of the excess weight and make the aircraft more manoeuvrable. I was in full afterburner, the plane descending, and it was time to ditch everything I could. But as I went into the loaded roll, for some reason I didn’t jettison. I put my hand on the button … yet I didn’t push it. To this day, I still don’t know what stopped me. In that microsecond I thought, It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s too late. This missile’s either going to hit us or it’s going to miss. It doesn’t matter.

All of us have said or thought those innocuous few words — ‘It doesn’t matter’ — countless times. Hardly any of us, however, have said them when it really doesn’t matter what we do anymore — when the consequence of our next action, the result of our next one or two living seconds, is the smallest of small margins between success and death. Between living and dying, and not even having the opportunity to say goodbye to everything and everyone we love.

It doesn’t matter … It is the risk a servant of the armed forces takes as soon as he or she signs up. But it’s one that very few servicemen or servicewomen ever actually face or can easily comprehend.

The tension and mental strain in the cockpit was palpable. I had sweat running down every crevice of my body and I could hear myself breathing heavily. My eyes were straining, but thankfully my hands were steady.

I carried out my manoeuvre with my eyes searching everywhere, still trying to find that bloody missile. My back-seater was as quiet as anything because he knew our time might be up. I hadn’t even had the chance to alert our mission’s lead aircraft as to what was going on.

The barrel roll took around two seconds, and when I came out of it I didn’t know what to do. I guessed that the missile had passed — because I was still alive. Out of instinct, I did another barrel roll as a further precaution. Still nothing. I sat there in stunned silence.

Once back at base, with the bonus of having my feet firmly planted on terra firma, I could see that the whole incident — the period in which my life had been most at risk in all of my risky thirty-one years on Earth up until that point — had lasted all of about seven or eight seconds. Maybe ten at most. It had seemed like a lifetime.

Hindsight also tells me now that I made it through because I’d been preparing for those seven or eight seconds all my life.

CHAPTER 1

Growing the love affair

I came into this world on a sunny spring morning on 16 September 1971, a second child for my mum, Lesleigh, and dad, Rohan, and a brother to Kerri, who had been born two years earlier. I’m told that my arrival in Scott Memorial Hospital in Scone — a small country town in New South Wales’ Hunter Valley, known as the horse capital of Australia — was as uneventful as a birth can be. There were no dramas with the labour or delivery, and I weighed in at a healthy seven pounds in the old system, or about 3.25 kilos in today’s terms.

As I approached my fortieth birthday, in 2011, I took a look online to see what was going on around the time I was born. It was a period when William ‘Billy’ McMahon was prime minister, Australian troops were planning to withdraw from Vietnam, and Fiddler on the Roof was topping box offices around the world. Silver Knight won the Melbourne Cup, Hawthorn the VFL flag, and South Sydney the New South Wales Rugby League title. It was also the year when the microprocessor was invented and Greenpeace was born.

Our family was like many other Australian regional blue-collar families of that era: Mum stayed at home to rear and raise us while Dad went off to work to keep the household afloat. Dad was handsome, lean and fit, and had muscles that I can remember from my earliest days. He had the big, strong hands of a builder and the brains of a surgeon. And he could run. Even by the time I was approaching high school, when he ran, I couldn’t keep up. Mum was thin and slightly above average height, with beautiful, short dark hair. She carried herself well, and had a caring nature that could put anyone at ease. Her greatest strength was her love for and support of the family.

In my early days we lived in a three-bedroom Housing Commission home on Main Street in Muswellbrook, just 30 kilometres down the New England Highway from Scone and about 220 klicks from Sydney. As in most Housing Commission properties inhabited by single-income families, we lived modestly, but we were never without food and large doses of love and laughter. Mum doted on my sister and me, and the three of us spent plenty of time playing and having fun while Dad was off earning a crust. Like Mum, Kerri had short, dark hair, and in our early years my sister and I looked a lot alike. She had a wholesome round face dotted with freckles and, not surprisingly, given the body shapes of our parents, she was thin too.

Kerri was scared of dogs as a toddler, so when it came to getting a family pet, Mum and Dad bought a gentle black cocker spaniel — kelpie cross, which they named Jenny. Mum used to walk around the block with me in a stroller, Kerri walking some of the way, and loyal little Jenny on a lead. On one of these regular walks, this big old labrador bailed us up and Jenny — a fraction of his size, and shaking like a leaf — got between the other dog and us and barked at him until we were able to ease over to the other side of the road. Sadly, when she was only about one, Jenny escaped and was hit by a car.

Like most boys, I was into building things from early on. Almost all my toys were planes or cars for my slot track. I did have a stuffed toy dog named Nipper, who mysteriously disappeared when I was about five, never to be seen again. Neither Mum, Dad nor Kerri will take responsibility for that, but I have a feeling Dad may have chucked poor Nipper in the bin shortly before I started school.

I liked to climb, push, pull, prod and kick stuff too. In fact, my first real memory is of climbing a fence at our place in Muswellbrook and then progressing to a tree. It was all standard kid fare. From what I remember and have been told, I was a happy child whose normalcy belied the unorthodox path I would travel in years to come.

Work for Dad, a man of above-average intellect, was as an electrical engineer at the Liddell Power Station, down the road from where we lived. He worked Monday to Friday, with plenty of long days and hard graft. And when he wasn’t at the power station, he was often busy at home building things for the house or working in the garage on the car. His goal was always to improve the quality of our lives without spending too much money — money we didn’t necessarily have.

But I think it was the weekends and family time that Dad lived for. On the weekends, he would head off to Warkworth, another small Hunter region town — consisting of a petrol station, three houses and a caravan park — to fly at the local gliding club. Dad sure loved flying and, all things considered, there was never a chance I would get hooked on anything else. I think I was born to fly.

Dad’s father, George, had been a pilot as a young man, flying in defence of our nation in World War II, and once I earned my pilot’s licence I was the third living pilot in the Hall gang. When I joined the military a little over three years later, I was the second Hall to actively serve my country.

George — or to me, Pop — had been interested in aviation when he was a teenager, watching the war develop. He was a smart individual, brilliant at maths, and he loved problem-solving — all traits of successful fighter pilots. As soon as he was old enough, he put in his application to the Royal Australian Air Force and was accepted into pilot training. He trained at Temora, in southwest New South Wales, a place I would later fly at a lot. Pop began on the Tiger Moth prior to flying heavier aircraft, such as Oxfords and Ansons, in the South Pacific and was learning to fly the Beaufort when the war finished. Unfortunately, given the cost of flying, when he left the RAAF in 1945 — to study — that was the end of his career as a pilot.

Because of Pop’s history in the war, Dad — the eldest of three children — read a lot about aircraft and developed his own fascination for the skies. As a teenager, he joined the Air Training Corps, then won a scholarship to get his pilot’s licence for free. He trained on a Chipmunk out of Bankstown Airport while he was still at school and university. There would be no career in the air force for Rohan Hall, though. Pop warned him against joining, educating him on the atrocities of war, and considering this was the mid 1960s it was probably sound advice. Funnily enough, I remember having that exact same conversation with my dad when I was in my teens.

So, flying was in my blood — and it wasn’t long before it was thrust before my eyes too. Almost from when I was able to walk and talk, Dad would take us all off to Warkworth with him.

Gliding, or soaring, is the cheapest form of flying. A mostly recreational but sometimes competitive activity — pilots fly unpowered aircraft by using rising air to gain altitude — the lack of an engine makes gliders far less costly than powered aircraft. When conditions are good enough, experienced glider pilots can fly hundreds of kilometres before returning to their home airfields. Occasionally flights of over 1000 kilometres can be achieved. For all these reasons — the affordability, its recreational nature and the lack of power — gliding is one of the most common avenues for beginner pilots to learn the tricks of the trade.

One thing a glider does need help with is launching. Usually this is done with the aid of a powered aircraft, or tow-plane, which takes the glider to the desired height, attached by a strong rope, until the glider pilot is high enough and releases their end of the rope. And it was this tow-plane that allowed my dad to indulge in his love of flying when he had a growing family and lacked the spare cash to hire or buy a plane. Dad volunteered to pilot the club’s Auster tow-plane in return for the air time he’d be afforded between taking glider pilots up into the sky. The arrangement worked well for both club and clubman.

Just as most boys do, I regarded my dad as a bit of a hero, and the flying added to it. To me, the fact that my dad flew aeroplanes was the coolest thing in the world. I used to tell everyone that he was a pilot and I was going to be a pilot too.

In the first few years of my life I already thought I was a glider pilot. I used to spend hours on end sitting in the cockpit of grounded empty gliders, watching, listening and — looking back now, it would seem — learning. Those are my first memories of being in an aircraft.

One is still clear. This particular day, I was sitting in the front of a glider, inside the hangar, when a car was hooked up to the glider to tow it down to the operational end of the airfield: I was going for a ride, with someone walking along next to it. I was sitting in the moving glider, thinking this was kinda cool, and I watched the Auster go past with another glider on tow. It was mighty exciting for a two-year-old!

By the age of two and a half, I was a regular at Warkworth, and it was not long into my third year on Earth that I experienced my first real experience above it. My first-ever flight was in a Piper Cherokee from Scone. Dad was the pilot and we had another passenger along for company, and most probably babysitting duties — but I can’t really recall anything about it. For any kid of that age, the flight would have been an historic moment, but considering the direction my life has taken over the ensuing forty years, it was even more significant. Shame I don’t remember it.

There was a flight in the middle of 1976, when I was four, that I do remember well, however. I was sitting in the right seat of the tow-plane, with Dad next to me, my eyes wide. I could barely see over the airframe, even with the three cushions placed strategically under my behind. By then I had lots of books, and my favourite one was an adventure about a guy by the name of Pilot Small. I was fascinated, obsessed even, with Pilot Small. When I wasn’t entranced reading the book, I was zooming around with a toy plane pretending to perform the aerobatic manoeuvres and heroic flying that Pilot Small would do. I still have the book somewhere at home.

For a four-year-old, I knew a lot. Partly from Pilot Small books, but mostly from my dad, I knew that when a small plane landed with its two front wheels and its tiny back wheel hitting the ground simultaneously, it was called a three-point landing. I can distinctly remember asking Dad to do a three-point landing that day — just as I had practised with my toy plane that in my expanding mind was being piloted by Pilot Small.

Initially, my concept of the three-pointer had been confused. When I was trying to get Pilot Small onto the ground safely one day, I had asked Dad if a particular landing on the grass might be worth four points rather than the three points normally given … On that occasion I thought I’d done it really well! All I heard was laughter. Then came the explanation that the number of ‘points’ related to the number of wheels, not to the style or degree of difficulty of the landing (or indeed the scores that I would later be judged by in aerobatic competitions all around the world). I understood as much as a four-year-old could, but I still wanted my landings to be worth four or more points. That must’ve been my competitive nature coming out already. Certainly it was the first time I related being the best to flying. It was the start of something special.

Not long after it began, though, my flying career was over. Or so it seemed. Dad picked up a job in Sydney and we packed up and moved to beautiful Queenscliff, at the northern end of Manly Beach. We’d been there about six months before Dad’s growing reputation at work saw him sent to the southwestern German town of Karlsruhe, where he would do reconnaissance on the latest electric turbines before his employer, the Electricity Commission of New South Wales, installed them in Australia.

I am sure it was a fantastic experience for the family. But if I’m honest, I don’t recall too much about our time in Germany, except that it was cold and we didn’t get to see my grandparents as often as we used to. I also remember we stopped going to the airfield. There was always something to do, though — a ball to kick, a tree to climb or some game to play — so I was happy.

It would turn out to be the longest period in my life that I would spend away from flying. After half a year overseas we returned to Australia and moved to Swansea, on Lake Macquarie. There I began to dream again.

There had been plenty of changes over the previous year and a bit — a quarter of my life — but one thing didn’t change. I still loved anything to do with aviation.

For many months before I started school and during my first year or so there, thoughts about flying and aircraft and all things aviation consumed most of my waking moments.

I think every drawing I ever did contained an aircraft. It started as a simple stick figure of a plane somewhere in the sky and became more detailed as I grew older. This attracted lots of comments from preschool teachers and people we knew. At one stage I became particularly focused on hang gliders and used to scrawl them everywhere. They were easy to draw: a triangle with a dude hanging from it. When we lived in Germany, we often visited places where hang gliders were jumping off the Alps and I’d want to rush home and draw them.

Everything had to revolve around aircraft. If I was doing some craft, I would build a plane. If I was in a drawing session or even if we were learning to write a number, I would put a plane in the top right corner of the page. It had to have a plane. I wasn’t doing it to be smart; just, in my mind, that had to happen.

Dad educated me well on aircraft and the science behind flying. I knew the wings were there to create lift and the propeller was what moved the plane forwards. I learned the principles of gliding from an early age. I knew that they flew by descending and that they needed thermals to go up. I also knew a cloudy day was good for gliding and a blue-sky day was good for power flying.

There was even a time, at age two or three, when I’d tried to apply basic aviation principles to the family car. After watching Dad working under the bonnet, I pointed to the cooling fan and told him that the car went forwards by using the propeller — because that’s what happened on aircraft.

In 1977 I started at Swansea Public School. While I remember nothing extra-special happening in kindergarten or first and second grade, they were happy days and I enjoyed the challenge of school. Swansea was a quiet little town; the streets weren’t busy, and when I got my first pushbike, the freedom to be able to ride to school was great.

Kerri went to the same school and was a protective and caring influence. While we had started to develop the classic first child/ second child syndrome — whereby she would speak for me and tell me what to do, causing me to rebel — I looked up to her. I was always proud of her when she achieved something at school or did well in the physical culture competitions she had become very good at.

There was a short period when my interest in aviation started to wane ever so slightly and I stuck to doing the things most kids did. But that only lasted until Dad took up flying again — at Aero Pelican, a small airport with a sealed runway, a few kilometres from home and the school. They had a Twin Otter flying out of there and I used to love the sound of that plane taking off. From our house, you could hear it hurtling down the runway and you were able to see it soon after take-off, when it reached about 100 feet.

Around about then I learned about turboprops. It blew me away when one flew overhead. I knew it had propellers, and it didn’t sound like any other plane I’d ever heard. I had to find out more. Dad explained that the engine is a small jet engine, and rather than using all its energy as exhaust out the back to produce thrust, it used the energy to drive a normal aircraft propeller. So, it sounded like a cross between a jet and a normal propeller-driven aircraft.

While school kicked along without too much excitement, my aviation education and adventures continued. When I was around seven or eight, Dad started flying a Citabria after we saw it at Aero Pelican one day, and I fell in love with that plane. It was a beautiful-looking aircraft, with a paint scheme that was really exciting. It had stripes and stars and looked so cool when parked next to the other planes, which were plain white or silver.

In the air the Citabria outperformed all the Cessna 150s and Cherokee 140s, which were the planes of the day. This thing could eat them up, especially in ‘the circuit’. From our place at Swansea I’d watch the planes climb out on the upwind leg from the runway after take-off. As soon as they broke ground, you could see the Cessna climbing away to the west, but the Citabria would climb at probably 20 degrees, nose up, and then turn inside the other aircraft, overtaking them in the circuit with its superior performance. That was impressive.

Dad did his conversion on the rented Citabria in 1978. Unlike cars, when there is a new aircraft type you want to fly, you can’t just jump in and take it for a spin. Every aircraft type is different — different speeds, different engine management and different instruments. A pilot is required to do a conversion to a new type with an instructor.

Following the conversion, Dad obtained a formal aerobatic rating, starting off with spins and rolls. After he got that rating, I was able to go for a fly with him in the Citabria and experience aerobatics for the first time — which was quite daunting for me. To be honest, I was as nervous as I had probably ever been in my young life. And it’s one of the only times I’ve been nervous about a flight, apart from competition or test flights. But I was also super excited, and I struggled to get to sleep on the nights leading up to the big day. I had my heart set on flying upside down — I thought that would be out of this world.

It was also the first time I wore a headset. That made me feel grown up too, and it made communication with Dad much better. Prior to then, we just used to yell at each other once we were airborne. You can imagine how cool I thought I was: I’m wearing a headset, about to go upside down in an aircraft … Cool!

By way of a warm-up, Dad said we’d do a stall, whereby we make the wing stop flying. Well, that totally freaked me out! Suddenly there were all these new noises and stall warnings going off. As we did the stall, it surprised me how aggressively the plane dropped. I lost my stomach, my feet flew up in the air and when the plane’s nose fell I had an almighty feeling of panic. I had never experienced that sensation before.

We recovered and Dad asked if I wanted to do another stall. I recall specifically saying no. Next he then started doing steep turns, and all I wanted to do was go upside down. As he’s making the turns — big, sweeping manoeuvres that, when looking through the side windows, made it impossible to tell which way up the plane now was — I kept asking: ‘Did we go upside down in that one? Did we go upside down in that one?’

Dad got me to look out the front window, towards the horizon. That was my introduction to attitude flying. Attitude is the term given to the aircraft’s nose position relative to the Earth’s horizon, and is how a pilot flies the aircraft. If the nose is above the horizon, it has a nose high attitude. And if the aircraft is turning, the angle of bank can be seen by the angle the horizon makes out the front window.

On that same flight we did a couple of spins and I found them terrifying. Combining a stall with what felt like uncontrollable rotations, while pointing straight at the ground, was not (then) my cup of tea — or glass of Milo, as my drink of choice probably was at that age. It didn’t feel like we were in control of the aircraft. Although I trusted my dad, it was still distressing to me in the cockpit. I wasn’t crying, screaming or asking Dad to stop, but I remember thinking: This is something I have to do, but gee, I’ll be happy when it’s over.

After the flight I was a little disappointed in myself. I felt I had endured all those spins and turns and moments upside down simply to tick the box — to tell people I’d done it. I didn’t feel like I’d enjoyed the experience. And I certainly wasn’t keen to do it again in the near future.

It was troubling for me. Here I was, I thought, all grown up, an aerobatic aviator ready to be a pilot for the rest of my life, and I didn’t like it. There were dark thoughts. Maybe flying wasn’t for me. Maybe from the ground it looked good, but when I was actually in the air, I didn’t enjoy it after all. This was a sobering moment for me. I didn’t do aerobatics again with Dad for some time afterwards.

My break from aerobatics didn’t stop me from trying what I hoped would be the more mellow experience of gliding. Dad rejoined the gliding club at Warkworth in 1979 and by then they had sold the old Auster and were winch-launching — which basically involved having a souped-up V8 engine on the back of a truck, with a wire on a big reel connected to a glider. The aircraft goes up about 45 degrees to between 1500 and 2000 feet, releases the wire, a little parachute opens, and the wire floats back down to the ground before a car picks it up, drags it back to the next glider and the whole process is repeated. It was cheaper than running a tow-plane.

I viewed these winch launches as another potential problem for my flying career: I hated them with a passion. They had exciting acceleration but were scary because to be climbing at 45 degrees nose up, there was a risk that the cable could break. If it broke, you had to bunt the nose of the aircraft forward below the horizon to regain flying speed before the wing stalled. Then you either had to land up ahead or do a really tight circuit and possibly a downwind landing. Depending on where it happened, it could be fairly challenging.

Once a day someone would have a cable break. It looked spectacular. Everyone would take a deep breath and then hoot and holler, just like when a surfer takes off on a massive wave at the beach.

The possibility of a cable break happening to me used to scare me. It wasn’t so much that I would crash, more the uncomfortable sensations associated with the moment. Top of the list was that horrible stomach-turning feeling I’d experienced doing basic aerobatics as you bunted over the top. Now I know it as ‘negative G’ and I’m very experienced and comfortable with it. Back then, I didn’t like the feeling one bit.

With these winch launches, the cable would connect underneath the front belly of the glider, whereas a normal aero-tow cable hooked onto the nose. So with this new system, when I was in the glider with Dad, it was effectively connected straight below my seat at the back of the cockpit. That experience and the accompanying sounds were like someone running their fingernails down a blackboard. Times a hundred.

That wasn’t all though. I’d be stacked on a bed of cushions, and I could just manage to see out of the little window next to my head. As we’d accelerate and pull the nose up to 45 degrees, the only direction I was able to look was straight up — at the blue sky. If I craned my neck, I could see the horizon out the side window, at a weird angle — all the while accompanied by the