Big Fearty
by Alasdair McPherson
Genre: Memoir
Swearwords: None.
Description: As honest as any other autobiography!
_____________________________________________________________________
Everything happens early these days. When I was young, teenage girls were still playing with dolls; nowadays every self-respecting sixteen year old has a real baby of her very own. Even problems in coping arrive earlier: my daughter and her friends have all had panic attacks in their teens!
I was thirty-something when my panic struck and I was so naïve that I did not recognise it at the time. Being at bottom a hypochondriac, I thought it was a heart attack or maybe terminal cancer. It was nothing physical that brought it on: I had already survived a flight where I was lifted out of my seat by turbulence without even soiling my undies.
The closest I came before the big day was sitting for over two hours on an uncomfortable bench seat in the last flying Beverley waiting for about fifty others to leave so that I could make my first, and (so far) only, parachute jump. I watched, with little more than passing interest, the man opposite me curling into the foetal position and sucking his thumb as we circled over Weymouth Bay.
The trouble was that there were only three rubber dinghies to pick us up, so we had to go down in groups of three; three men out, circle round, three more men out then circle again. More boring than frightening, to tell the truth. We had spent the previous day practicing on static rigs in a hangar and, before an early night in the bar, we had a pep talk from an aged Squadron Leader:
“The X-Type parachute is the safest ever manufactured.” Ten second pause while his eagle eye swept around us to be sure he had our attention.
“However!! If it does fail you have an emergency ‘chute strapped to your chest. Just pull the rip-cord and continue your descent to a safe landing.” Slightly longer pause and an even more piercing look from a still beadier eye.
“However!!! If the second ‘chute fails you should still survive since you are falling into water. Just cover the family jewels and pray.”
When my turn to jump came I had a flutter or two, I will admit, but I walked the length of the plane looking, I was told afterwards, pretty cool. I have no memory of fixing and checking my static line nor of exiting the aircraft – did I jump or was I pushed? The first thing I remember was being buffeted in the slipstream then looking up to see a great white cloud of silk opening above my head. I was still admiring this when the guys in the dinghy started shouting at me. I had not been aware that the slow gentle descent I was enjoying was actually pretty rapid.
By the time I realised I was nearly there it was too late to turn the box over my belly-button, strike it sharply with the heel of the hand and drop, gracefully, the last two feet into the water unencumbered by silk and lines and harness. The boat crew saved the parachute first from the tangled mess and only bothered to get me into the boat when it was safely stowed.
I did not exactly expect a hero’s welcome from them for my derring-do but I did feel it was out of order for them to abuse me for not completing the drill to their satisfaction. The holidaymakers who had watched our antics were rather more appreciative and even gave us a little clap when we strutted ashore. They probably mistook us for intrepid pilots instead of an assortment of scientists who normally flew desks and had cups of stewed tea brought to us twice a day.
The only other time that I was mistaken for a pilot, it almost got me lynched. My mate, Clive, dropped the flaps on his Canberra to skim his home complete with his new bride. Julie, an unashamedly gorgeous stewardess from the days when ‘pc’ meant a guardian of the law, rushed out and waved a saucepan at him – she had been searching the packaging for the operating manual. The consequent increase in engine roar when he compensated for the extra drag of the flaps, frightened half the weans and all the maiden ladies in the village. That evening when I went for a quiet drink they thought I was the culprit!
Clive was more amused than contrite but he found it much harder to see the funny side when he was demonstrating the HP115 at an air show. His father, in the front row of the VIP stands, stood up, faced the assembled dignitaries and proclaimed his paternal pride in the young aviator. The audience applauded, with a smattering of cheers as he stood there wiping his eyes with a snowy-white handkerchief not much bigger than a tray cloth; but Clive hid in the crew room for the rest of the day.
I was only a category ‘B’ air observer: I could fly on an ejection seat to sixty thousand feet. Every two years in the dead of winter I had to go to be checked by men whose day job was developing and testing safety equipment including test runs on a sled from which they deployed an ejector system. Their respect for scientists who occasionally air observed would have been hard to detect with an electron microscope!
The compression chamber was up about ten steps. You got in and sat knee to knee with a partner. At an equivalent height of thirty thousand feet you took off your oxygen mask and started writing your name and address on a clip board. Your partner put your oxygen mask back on when you passed out. Some people could manage to write for thirty seconds or so but I succumbed before I had completed my first name. The reason they put us through it is that dying from lack of oxygen is remarkably hard to detect: you feel quite euphoric right up to the moment you become unconscious. What they failed to warn us about was that the tiny pressure change between the chamber and the ground ten steps below would be enough to cause us to stagger – the instructors loved it but the students had reservations.
The other popular spectator sport for the instructors was to watch us climb into a tank of freezing water, get into a rubber dinghy and deploy the search and rescue beacon housed in our mae wests. The battery was in one pocket and had to be dipped in the water to activate it. The transponder was in the other pocket and had to be placed in a holder on the side of the dinghy. The really tricky bit was the aerial; some genius decided to store it under the floatation collar of the life preserver. By this stage your fingers looked like raw pork sausages and the nearest functioning nerve ending were departing your elbow on the way to your shoulder.
Getting your hands in position to unclip the aerial was almost impossible. Any control you had was based on watching them move and willing them to open and close. Operating behind your head out of your view with hands you could not feel was a nightmare. You had to judge where they must be by dead reckoning based on the position and angle of your forearms – the nearest point to your hands you could actually see.
When my panic attack did come, I was smartly dressed in a suit standing in the wings of an auditorium in a hotel near Washington National Airport. I was next to be introduced to an audience of twelve hundred aviation specialists as a member of a panel of experts when I found that I could not breathe and that I was suffering waves of faintness. Brian Trubshaw, the Concorde test pilot, was standing behind me and he took my elbow when I staggered. He asked if I was all right but before I could reply my name and qualifications were blared out and I stumbled out to take my seat on stage in the rantin’, dauntin’ family tradition: the show must go on even if one of the cast is at death’s door!
It turned out to be much less scary than I thought. By the time I actually had to answer a question I was quite enjoying the whole thing. It helped that I was sitting next to Jean Franchi, the French test pilot, who kept me entertained by whispering scurrilous comments on everyone in sight.
So just when I was feeling all relaxed, the real ordeal started. We trooped off stage and were led to a table in the dining room. Not only were we ringed by twelve hundred other diners but we were on a dais that made us the cynosure of neighbouring eyes. Even the intrepid test pilots bottled out of eating the peas!
Swearwords: None.
Description: As honest as any other autobiography!
_____________________________________________________________________
Everything happens early these days. When I was young, teenage girls were still playing with dolls; nowadays every self-respecting sixteen year old has a real baby of her very own. Even problems in coping arrive earlier: my daughter and her friends have all had panic attacks in their teens!
I was thirty-something when my panic struck and I was so naïve that I did not recognise it at the time. Being at bottom a hypochondriac, I thought it was a heart attack or maybe terminal cancer. It was nothing physical that brought it on: I had already survived a flight where I was lifted out of my seat by turbulence without even soiling my undies.
The closest I came before the big day was sitting for over two hours on an uncomfortable bench seat in the last flying Beverley waiting for about fifty others to leave so that I could make my first, and (so far) only, parachute jump. I watched, with little more than passing interest, the man opposite me curling into the foetal position and sucking his thumb as we circled over Weymouth Bay.
The trouble was that there were only three rubber dinghies to pick us up, so we had to go down in groups of three; three men out, circle round, three more men out then circle again. More boring than frightening, to tell the truth. We had spent the previous day practicing on static rigs in a hangar and, before an early night in the bar, we had a pep talk from an aged Squadron Leader:
“The X-Type parachute is the safest ever manufactured.” Ten second pause while his eagle eye swept around us to be sure he had our attention.
“However!! If it does fail you have an emergency ‘chute strapped to your chest. Just pull the rip-cord and continue your descent to a safe landing.” Slightly longer pause and an even more piercing look from a still beadier eye.
“However!!! If the second ‘chute fails you should still survive since you are falling into water. Just cover the family jewels and pray.”
When my turn to jump came I had a flutter or two, I will admit, but I walked the length of the plane looking, I was told afterwards, pretty cool. I have no memory of fixing and checking my static line nor of exiting the aircraft – did I jump or was I pushed? The first thing I remember was being buffeted in the slipstream then looking up to see a great white cloud of silk opening above my head. I was still admiring this when the guys in the dinghy started shouting at me. I had not been aware that the slow gentle descent I was enjoying was actually pretty rapid.
By the time I realised I was nearly there it was too late to turn the box over my belly-button, strike it sharply with the heel of the hand and drop, gracefully, the last two feet into the water unencumbered by silk and lines and harness. The boat crew saved the parachute first from the tangled mess and only bothered to get me into the boat when it was safely stowed.
I did not exactly expect a hero’s welcome from them for my derring-do but I did feel it was out of order for them to abuse me for not completing the drill to their satisfaction. The holidaymakers who had watched our antics were rather more appreciative and even gave us a little clap when we strutted ashore. They probably mistook us for intrepid pilots instead of an assortment of scientists who normally flew desks and had cups of stewed tea brought to us twice a day.
The only other time that I was mistaken for a pilot, it almost got me lynched. My mate, Clive, dropped the flaps on his Canberra to skim his home complete with his new bride. Julie, an unashamedly gorgeous stewardess from the days when ‘pc’ meant a guardian of the law, rushed out and waved a saucepan at him – she had been searching the packaging for the operating manual. The consequent increase in engine roar when he compensated for the extra drag of the flaps, frightened half the weans and all the maiden ladies in the village. That evening when I went for a quiet drink they thought I was the culprit!
Clive was more amused than contrite but he found it much harder to see the funny side when he was demonstrating the HP115 at an air show. His father, in the front row of the VIP stands, stood up, faced the assembled dignitaries and proclaimed his paternal pride in the young aviator. The audience applauded, with a smattering of cheers as he stood there wiping his eyes with a snowy-white handkerchief not much bigger than a tray cloth; but Clive hid in the crew room for the rest of the day.
I was only a category ‘B’ air observer: I could fly on an ejection seat to sixty thousand feet. Every two years in the dead of winter I had to go to be checked by men whose day job was developing and testing safety equipment including test runs on a sled from which they deployed an ejector system. Their respect for scientists who occasionally air observed would have been hard to detect with an electron microscope!
The compression chamber was up about ten steps. You got in and sat knee to knee with a partner. At an equivalent height of thirty thousand feet you took off your oxygen mask and started writing your name and address on a clip board. Your partner put your oxygen mask back on when you passed out. Some people could manage to write for thirty seconds or so but I succumbed before I had completed my first name. The reason they put us through it is that dying from lack of oxygen is remarkably hard to detect: you feel quite euphoric right up to the moment you become unconscious. What they failed to warn us about was that the tiny pressure change between the chamber and the ground ten steps below would be enough to cause us to stagger – the instructors loved it but the students had reservations.
The other popular spectator sport for the instructors was to watch us climb into a tank of freezing water, get into a rubber dinghy and deploy the search and rescue beacon housed in our mae wests. The battery was in one pocket and had to be dipped in the water to activate it. The transponder was in the other pocket and had to be placed in a holder on the side of the dinghy. The really tricky bit was the aerial; some genius decided to store it under the floatation collar of the life preserver. By this stage your fingers looked like raw pork sausages and the nearest functioning nerve ending were departing your elbow on the way to your shoulder.
Getting your hands in position to unclip the aerial was almost impossible. Any control you had was based on watching them move and willing them to open and close. Operating behind your head out of your view with hands you could not feel was a nightmare. You had to judge where they must be by dead reckoning based on the position and angle of your forearms – the nearest point to your hands you could actually see.
When my panic attack did come, I was smartly dressed in a suit standing in the wings of an auditorium in a hotel near Washington National Airport. I was next to be introduced to an audience of twelve hundred aviation specialists as a member of a panel of experts when I found that I could not breathe and that I was suffering waves of faintness. Brian Trubshaw, the Concorde test pilot, was standing behind me and he took my elbow when I staggered. He asked if I was all right but before I could reply my name and qualifications were blared out and I stumbled out to take my seat on stage in the rantin’, dauntin’ family tradition: the show must go on even if one of the cast is at death’s door!
It turned out to be much less scary than I thought. By the time I actually had to answer a question I was quite enjoying the whole thing. It helped that I was sitting next to Jean Franchi, the French test pilot, who kept me entertained by whispering scurrilous comments on everyone in sight.
So just when I was feeling all relaxed, the real ordeal started. We trooped off stage and were led to a table in the dining room. Not only were we ringed by twelve hundred other diners but we were on a dais that made us the cynosure of neighbouring eyes. Even the intrepid test pilots bottled out of eating the peas!
About the Author
Originally from Dalmuir, Alasdair McPherson is now retired and living in exile in Lincolnshire.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned two novels and is now trying his hand at short stories.
You can read his full profile on McVoices.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned two novels and is now trying his hand at short stories.
You can read his full profile on McVoices.