How it happened
Let me start by admitting that this whole tale is all about flying. Probably flying doesn't turn you on as much as it does me, but all you have to do is substitute your own passion and I am sure you will understand where I am coming from.
When I was a boy I was passionate about aeroplanes.
I made plastic models and to the despair of my mother, hung them all over my bedroom to gather dust. She use to break the propellers off with her duster; she didn't mean to but they weren't as important to her as they were for me. I used to hang them by threads in realistic flying attitudes so I could lay in bed and make engine noises and imagine them swooping and roaring across the sky.
We lived about five miles from a large aeroplane factory and airfield. I used to cycle out to stand by the perimeter fence and hope that I would see an aeroplane take off or land. I had books and magazines, my head was full of aeroplanes.
As I grew older, I remained interested but the steam had gone out of it. I could handle them a lot better. Then, one day, my father-in-law was clearing some old junk out of his attic. He asked if I wanted some part-built model aeroplanes and some model magazines - in particular, he had a pair of wings about six feet long, made of a balsa wood framework and covered in red transparent plastic. I didn't have the heart to refuse to take the junk away. It meant little to me, so I squeezed it into the back of the car and drove the family home. For a long time I didn't do anything with it. Then one day I got the bits out of the shed and sort of stuck them together. They made a fairly sizeable aeroplane. I threw this about the yard for a while, it flew after a fashion. Eventually it got broken and I put it back in the shed. There I rediscovered the magazines and took a few of them inside to read. From these I discovered that you could really build and fly radio-controlled models. I could hardly believe it, I was completely out of touch with what had happened over the last thirty years. I telephoned my father-in-law and he said 'Sure, everyone is doing it. I have an old radio control set you can have if you want.' Wow!
So that started me back into aeroplanes in a big way. Over the next few years I built and flew a whole host of radio-controlled gliders, I still do.
The next thing that happened was that I discovered computer flight simulators. I don't want to bore you unnecessarily but, in case you don't know, you can get pretty realistic flight simulations which allow you to operate all the controls that a real aeroplane would have. In addition, you can look out of the window and fly around a real landscape and visit and land at airfields. It's magic if you are interested in that sort of thing, and I am.
Things were getting pretty serious. Just like when I was a boy, I took to visiting my local airfield (a different one, because I had moved away from my home town by now) to watch the little planes come and go. I just knew that you had to be really rich to learn to fly, so I watched enviously as the student pilots came and went. I gazed through the windows off the airfield cafe where all those rich pilots and their passengers were (I thought) enjoying expensive gourmet lunches. After a few visits like this I gave myself a talking to. Here was I, a forty three year old man behaving like a fourteen year old. I plucked up courage and went in to the flying school and put on a pretty good act of being grown up. They told me about learning to fly and about how much it cost. It costs quite a lot in England but, when I added it all up it at least I had a definite figure. This was an important step, by finding out exactly what it would cost (in fact it did cost a bit more in the end) I had a concrete figure to think about. Before I did this I just had the agony of imagining bigger and bigger figures, all of which were impossible to meet. Another big step was that I discovered that it wasn't a gourmet restaurant after all, it was a rather tired and seedy cafe where you could get burgers and coffee. Suddenly the people sitting around inside began to look a lot more like me than I ever thought they would. Maybe, I began to think, just maybe.
I'll spare you further details until you read the full report, but I did start to learn to fly and in 1993 I got my licence. In the report I describe how I found a way to afford it - an instructive lesson in its own right, but not the main thing.
After I got my licence, I used to fly the club planes. There was an hourly hire charge which was so high that it severely limited the amount of flying I could do. After about four years of struggling along like that I bought a share in a small aeroplane. With seven of us to share the expense, the cost of flying was cut by about a third so I could do a bit more. The cost of the share was £4500 (about $7200), I'll tell you how I found that too. I felt pretty stretched financially.
After a year or so, I fell in with a remarkable bunch of pilots. They lived over at the other side of the airfield. They nearly all owned their own aeroplanes. The aeroplanes were older, more interesting types; often they were biplanes and made of wood and fabric rather than the heavyweight metal ones I was used to. I guess that some of these guys were rich, but some definitely were not. The one thing that they did have in common was that they had a hell of a lot of fun! I began to be attracted to this type of life. The idea of flying into farm strips and generally flying for the fun of it was, surprisingly, new to me. Over at the flying club, everybody took flying very seriously, as if they were all airline pilots - generally everyone flew in straight lines. Over on the other side a straight line was regarded as rather boring. But, the one big obstacle to joining this happy crowd was that I would have to get my own aeroplane.
This was a big step. If I had, so far, gone way beyond what at first seemed possible, then this was a cliff which brought me to a full stop. For a long time I thought about it, and the more I thought about it, the more I knew I really wanted to do it. Reluctantly I decided this was impossible. There was absolutely no way I would ever be able to find £15,000 - the cost of a very modest little two-seat wood-and-fabric aeroplane. I had a family, commitments, responsibilities, a mortgage. We had saved some money because we needed to be sure we could help our children through college, but there was no spare money at all. I had reached the end of the road, I would have to curb my ambitions and be content with what I had.
Then one day I was sitting in a hangar, talking with a good pilot friend of mine. He was again trying to persuade me that I should consider buying a little plane. I said (pretty much like I've just told you) that there was simply no way I could afford it. Then he said a pretty significant thing. As far as wise words go they were a little crude (I apologise for that), but they were certainly wise words. As I was, for the twentieth time, going through the list of reasons why it was impossible for me to afford a plane, he interrupted me and simply said 'That's crap!" I was shocked, not just because of his choice of words but because immediately I knew, in a flash, that it was true. I realised that I had been talking the most utter nonsense for years. Like a sword slicing a water melon in half, his rough words exposed the insubstantial and messy structure of my own ridiculous arguments. Of course I could afford an aeroplane. And I have. Here is a picture of me standing by it!