By Michael Gilmour 

You never forget your first solo. It’s better than the first time that you managed to stay upright on a bicycle, speed a car down a deserted country road at the ‘legal’ limit and I know it was far better than my first kiss with that gorgeous girl in grade six.

Your first solo is something that you’ll hopefully live with for the rest of your life. It’s a memory that transcends almost all others as it’s a point in time where you went where the masses feared to tread.

Most people have some secret desire to soar with the birds but often let either a lack of money or the fear of the wings dropping off as they collide into the side of a stationary mountain hold them back. And yet they still dream about flying through the air.

I’m fairly confident in saying that if more people could experience the sheer exhilaration of going solo we would finally enter the Jetson’s age where we all have ‘air-cars’ rather than our current ‘land-cars’. Alas, the experience of a first solo is denied to everyone but the most tenacious of individuals.

Let me digress for a minute and take a look at those two little words, ‘first’, ‘solo’. What ‘first’ really means is that you’re about to do something that you’ve never done before. You hear other people buzzing around the sky so they obviously managed to get past first base but for you there really isn’t anything before ‘first’. It’s not like you can say with pride that you’ve done your ‘zeroth’ solo. You’ve either done it or you haven’t.

First also suggests that there will hopefully be a second. When a person proudly announces that they’ve just completed their first solo what they are actually saying is that they have survived to do their second.

Solo means alone. There’s no one else that can bail you out of the mess you may have just gotten yourself into; it’s just you, the plane and gravity, that’s it.

Some naive individuals may believe Hollywood movies and think that the tower can get them out of trouble but, I hate to say it, when you’re solo there is no one else in the cockpit and unless you press the little ‘coms’ button they can’t even hear you scream. So ultimately what’s the point in stressing your vocal chords anyway?

So why is it that like lemmings many of us queue up to experience our first solo? I think that there is only one answer and it’s pretty cheesy, ‘because it’s there’. Deep down in the core of their being a pilot hears an almost primeaval call to step out of the cosy nest and leap into the air with a blind faith that a whirling donk and a few bits of aluminium stuck together with rivets will halt our deathly plummet.

So what was my first solo like? My instructor had an Italian background and accent and believed that, like a great pasta, great achievements should always start off as a surprise. Therefore the day that I first went solo I had no idea I would be airborne ‘tout seul’ which meant that I didn’t really have time to get that nervous and worked up about it.

My lessons started out as normal with a few practice circuits when my instructor said, “I thinka that youa shoulda doa full stoppa now”. No I didn’t just lose my spell checker it’s exactly what he said.

I didn’t know why we were finishing the lesson early so I called for a full stop and taxied off the runway towards the parking bay. The next thing I knew my instructor asked me to stop in the run-up bay, unplugged his headphones and wished me good luck!

It was an unusual feeling seeing the back of my Italian friend as he walked towards the clubhouse. It was even more unusual looking across the right hand seat and seeing it empty.

For a second I thought about powering down and keeping my feet safe on terra firma but one glance at the sky and I knew that it was enticing me out of my comfortable earthbound nest.

After completing my run-up checks I started taxiing to the holding point for 31R. For those of you that are familiar with Moorabbin you’ll understand that for a new pilot simply taxiing to a holding point can be a challenge with all the myriad of runways and taxiways going everywhere. It all makes sense from the air but when you’re on the ground it’s almost like a plate of spaghetti.

Lucky for me when I was ready to head off another plane began trundling down my taxiway so I just followed the leader to the holding point. This gave me a minute or so to take in my surroundings, play with the pedals and ensure that the DG was working fine.

It was nice sitting at the holding point with someone else in front of me as I didn’t feel under pressure to complete my checks. While I waited for the first plane to take-off I felt like a cat on a hot tin roof, rehearsing the call I would have to make to the tower.

I don’t know what it is about radio calls but most pilots find them amazingly intimidating at first. The first time I heard a radio call was on my wedding anniversary when my wife and I took a dinner flight around Melbourne. The plane was full so the pilot asked if anyone wanted to sit up with him. I stupidly jumped at the chance, donned a set of headphones and upon landing nearly got a divorce. It didn’t occur to me that my wife may actually want to be with me on our anniversary – after all a plane was involved.

I’ll never forget hearing the tower give the pilot of our flight an instruction at which time the pilot responded back with an affirmative. As far as I could make out it sounded more like a muffled chimpanzee chattering away and when the pilot agreed to the tower chimp, my estimations of what it would take to enter the pilot priesthood increased immeasurably.

One of the other things about radio calls is that they are all very public. If you stuff one up then everyone knows and pilots being pilots are very likely to request a repeat of your call because your first was unintelligible. The only saving grace is that when you get back to the aero club bar and there is raucous laughter about your radio call you can deny it and say you were in another aircraft.

In fact, I’ve heard of some pilots that get so worried about their radio calls that they just ‘forget’ to make them. This is not an advisable strategy to avoid embarrassment as it may reward you with an epitaph about your grave stone which reads, “Nice bloke, shame he didn’t communicate.”

 So there I was sitting at the holding point rehearsing my radio call. I was about to press the little button and announce to the pilot community that I was competent to fly all by myself. What resulted was a case of the nerves and I think that I was talking to ‘Moorabbin Flower’ not ‘Moorabbin Tower’ and miraculously there were two people onboard (which is the call I’d always done with my instructor) rather than just me.

Despite all the stuff ups I was given clearance by a very forgiving tower operator and, as I moved out onto the runway, I had visions of providing a certain amount of levity in the bar that night.

There is nothing quite like going solo for the first time and looking up ahead of you along the runway. I don’t really care what anyone else says but looking out the front window and seeing the runway disappear into the distance is absolutely awe inspiring. As a student pilot this is what you’ve been working for, this very point in time is what makes learning all of that BAK stuff worth it.

If you are a student pilot and haven’t done your first solo then I would like to give you some advice - savour this moment. Spend the two to three seconds looking up the runway with the realisation that you are about to enter a very special fraternity and do something that is so unnatural that 99% of the population believe that they can never do it.

I took my couple of seconds to get the plane lined up properly and then in the parlance of the motor car  industry I ‘floored it’ (with a touch of rudder). Remember those weight and balance calculations? Without the additional extra baggage of an instructor the aircraft sprints down the runway and begs to get into the air. That extra 70-80Kgs of person that is normally in the right hand seat makes a heck of a difference to performance. Likewise, overloading is a very risky business.

Everything happened so fast. The magic 64 knots seemed to instantly appear on the ASI and the wheels were off the ground. It was at this point that a realisation struck me like the headlights of a car reflecting off the glazed eyes of a rabbit on the road. Now that I’m up there is only one person that can get me down, me.

Training is a wonderful thing. What it does is prepare us mentally and physically for unfamiliar environments by creating a framework in which our poor little brains can cope. If you’re a student and wondering why your instructor is getting you to do yet another circuit then close your eyes for a second and imagine that they aren’t there. You’ll suddenly realise just how much work instructors do just by sitting and trying to keep you and themselves alive. Through repetition they are carving lines of familiarity into our thick skulls so that when we are alone we can get a plane up and down safely.

It was at the 500 foot mark that the training just kicked in. Fuel pump off, look around, turn to the right and keep on climbing. Inside my little brain my instructor had insidiously built an autopilot through circuit after circuit and things such as my ‘downwind’ call became automatic.

The training gave me time to enjoy the experience, remove the nerves and really focus on what I was doing. BUMFOH was done and shortly after I was turning onto base and dropping a couple of stages of flaps.

It was turning onto finals that really got the heart racing. It wasn’t fear or nerves or any of those things. It was pure unadulterated exhilaration.  Ahead was the runway with piano keys, the number 31R (glad that was the case!) and a big long stretch of bitumen. All it lacked was the Top Gun theme song. As far as I was concerned I was in an F111 not a Piper Warrior and looking out the front was the most beautiful sight that I’d ever seen.

I bet that every fighter pilot in the world still remembers their first solo as it if was yesterday. It’s engrained into their psyche and will never be lost. When you really think about it there is not much difference between what I was doing at that point in time and what an F18 or A380 does on finals.

Why is it that sometimes ‘finals’ seem to fly past while other times that leg of the circuit just seems to crawl by? I think that it’s preparation. If you’re setup correctly and right on the numbers then everything will seem slow but, if you aren’t, then the workload in the cockpit increases dramatically. On this particular day everything was perfect.

The airspeed was right at each stage, the flaps were set right, the aircraft was lined up on and I’d even remembered to deal with the carby heat (previously I’d always kept on forgetting to turn it on and off). The result was the wheels just touching down past the piano keys for a great landing for a little plane with a pilot which was in the process of experiencing the biggest endorphin rush he’d ever had.

Somehow I managed to pull onto the taxiway, clean-up the aircraft and make my ground call. After parking and getting out if you’d asked me, “What’s the meaning of life?”, I would have been quite prepared to go into a long a protracted exposition and how it somehow had to do with flying an aeroplane.

Quite frankly, I’d never experienced anything like the buzz that I was feeling. Leonardo de Caprio with his ‘I’m the king of the world!’ stunt in the movie Titanic had nothing on me. I’d just taken a plane into the air and landed back down again in one piece!

It was then that I’d discovered that flying wasn’t all about hours, endorsements and a heck of a lot of acronyms. Flying is about love. It’s when a pilot and a machine come together to achieve what until the last 100 years was an impossibility and that is flight. Flying solo is an initiation into the unique pilot fraternity where no one can doubt that you have become a pilot in every sense of the word.

If you haven’t yet achieved this milestone believe me that every pilot in the world is cheering you on as they also relive their own adventure and emotions of their first solo.