‘Thank God,’ I said.
‘Where’s the map?’ screamed Guy.
It was wedged on the coaming above the instrument panel. I handed it to him. He glanced around him and down at the map. We were entering a glen a couple of miles wide. Ahead of us and a little above was what looked like a saddle, a narrow pass between two mountains. Behind us was the storm.
‘We’re over Skye now,’ said Guy. ‘The airfield’s just over this saddle.’
He put on full power and began to climb. The Cessna 182 has a powerful engine and can usually climb at a thousand feet a minute, but we were achieving much less than that. We’d be lucky if we made it up to the saddle at that rate. We were climbing against a wind blowing down the mountain.
Mel had stopped screaming.
I looked down. We were passing over a small crescent-shaped loch. I grabbed the map and searched for it. I saw where Guy thought we were, just to the south of Broadford on the Isle of Skye. There was no crescent-shaped loch there. My eyes scanned the map, until I found one. There it was! On the mainland. Half way up a long valley that had a three-thousand-foot mountain at its head.
‘Guy, I don’t think we’re over Skye.’
‘Of course we are,’ said Guy.
‘But that loch down there. It’s on the mainland. We should turn back or we’ll hit this mountain.’ I tried to show him the map, but he brushed it away.
‘No way am I going back into that storm,’ said Guy. ‘And the airfield’s just a few miles ahead.’
‘It isn’t. Look at the compass. We’re flying north-east, not north.’
‘The compass is screwed up by the storm. Look. I’m the pilot-in-command. I’m the one with the licence. Will you just shut the fuck up!’
I shut up. Beyond the saddle was cloud. It might be hiding a mountain or it might not. The valley was narrowing. Soon it would be impossible to turn back without hitting the hills on either side. We were making some progress upwards and it looked like our rate of climb would just get us over the saddle. But after that? If I was right and there was a mountain there and not an airfield, we would have nowhere to fly but into it.
I looked down again. Another tiny loch with a clump of trees around it. I checked the map. Sure enough, a couple of miles up the glen from the crescent loch was a blue dot next to a green splodge.
‘Guy, turn around! I’m one hundred per cent sure there’s a mountain ahead.’
‘No! Now will you keep quiet!’
Guy wanted to believe that there was sanctuary over that saddle. He wanted to believe it so badly that he would ignore any evidence to the contrary. The saddle was close now. So were the sides of the valley. We might just be able to turn now, but if we waited ten more seconds...
I did what I had to do. I snatched the control column in front of me and yanked it to the right. Guy tried to regain control by pulling on his column but I was stronger than he was. The aircraft was sharply banked and we were turning. Turning right into a cliff.
‘Leave it, Guy, or we’ll hit it!’ I shouted. If Guy had succeeded in pulling us out of the turn we would fly straight into the mountain. He let go.
I saw rock, trees, bracken, a waterfall. Close, closer. We were only a few yards from the rock. Despite the steepness of the turn, we seemed to be moving round so slowly. Come on. Then the nose pulled away from the cliff and we were facing back the way we came. The throttle was still all the way in and I pointed the aeroplane upwards.
‘What are you doing!’ screamed Guy. ‘Are you crazy? You nearly got us killed!’
I looked back over his shoulder. There was a break in the cloud above the saddle. And through the break was a mountain.
If I hadn’t turned the aircraft round we would have ploughed straight into it. For sure.
Guy gasped. ‘Oh, my God.’ He went pale and his lips began to tremble. ‘Oh, my God.’
We were still climbing. The air was bumpy but I could see clear sky between the storm and the mountains. I pointed the aircraft towards it. I wasn’t sure I had the engine settings completely right, but the aeroplane was moving steadily and powerfully upwards and that was all that mattered.
The Isle of Skye was engulfed in cloud, but I was able to follow the coastline back to Mallaig in clear skies.
‘God,’ said Guy. ‘I’m sorry, Davo. Christ, I can’t believe it.’
I glanced at him. He was pale, in shock. I realized I would have to fly the aeroplane. I only had twelve hours in my logbook, and I had never flown anything as powerful as the Cessna before, but I could steer it and the throttle seemed to work in more or less the same way as the AA-5. I could have called up Scottish Information on the radio, but I wasn’t sure my radio-telephony skills were up to it. Fly to Oban and get Guy to land it was all I intended to do.
I turned the rear intercom on again and heard Mel sobbing. Ingrid was trying to comfort her.
‘Is it over?’ she asked.
‘I think so,’ I said.
But it wasn’t quite. I kept the coast on my left until I reached the white Ardnamurchan lighthouse, and then I followed the Sound of Mull towards where I hoped Oban would be. But what I saw was another towering thundercloud. There was no way we were going anywhere near one of those again. I remembered we had passed a grass airstrip on the north coast of Mull on our way up and I soon found it, just a couple of miles ahead.
I turned to Guy. He was hunched up, staring out of the window.
‘Can you land it now, Guy?’ I asked.
‘You do it,’ Guy said.
‘But I’ve never landed this aeroplane before. And I don’t know how to land on grass. You have to do it.’
‘OK,’ said Guy weakly. He took the controls and began to fiddle with the throttle and the propeller settings. Then he pushed them away. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t do it. You do it.’
‘Guy!’
He didn’t answer and just looked away.
So I pointed the aeroplane towards the tiny grass strip. It was right by the sea with a bloody great hill in the direction I was supposed to land from. I had done a few landings, some of them without even bouncing, but each time on a familiar tarmac runway with an instructor next to me for when I cocked it up, which at that stage was quite often.
This time, if I cocked it up there might not be another chance.
I pulled out the throttle and let down two stages of flap. The aircraft began to slow and lose height. I flew towards the hill and at the last minute turned to face the runway. In the Cessna the perspective was totally different from what I was used to and everything was happening very quickly. I was too high and too fast. Desperately I pulled the throttle all the way out, pushed the nose down and lowered the last stage of flap. Still too high, still too fast. The runway seemed to rush up at us, and before I had time to raise the nose, we had hit the ground hard. The aircraft reared back into the air in an enormous bounce. I hung on, and two bounces later we were on firm ground, speeding towards a hedge at the far end of the runway. I braked as hard as I could and waited. We shot past the runway threshold into long grass. That slowed us down more effectively than my braking and we came to rest a couple of yards from the hedge.
I killed the engine and the four of us sat there in the silence, unable to believe that we were actually on the ground.
21
August 1999, Clerkenwell, London
‘So, how are we doing, Guy?’
‘We’re live, we’re on the web and we’re getting forty thousand hits a week.’ Guy grinned at his father, brimming with the excitement of the previous few days.