GOING HOME FOR CHRISTMAS

I'm sure you are familiar with the 'Leave Bug'. It's a little worm which lives in calendars. It hatches in cycles of two. Just before you are due to go on leave it grabs the last five days of duty and makes each one last for 48 hours.

- HUGH PRYOR

TIME SEEMS TO GO BY slower and slower as your leave approaches, until it’s almost standing still.

The other worm works the other way round when you are actually on leave. It makes Tuesdays into Thursdays and Thursdays into Sundays. The last week of your leave is normally gone before you even knew it had started!

I was working in Libya at the time, flying a Pilatus Porter for a French “wireline” company whose job was to tell the Oily Boys what was down the holes they were drilling all over the desert.

I had done six of my four weeks duty time and was itching to get back for my first Christmas at home in six years. The only problem appeared to be that the company could not find any pilot to fill in for me while I was on leave. Eventually they dug up this tiny little French guy called André who had never flown a Pilatus Porter before. He said that he had seen them, but only in magazines.

The Porter has a mind of her own. She’s heavy on the controls, unstable in flight, has been known to suffer from aileron reversal at slow speeds and loves cross winds because that’s the time when she gets to show the uninitiated who the boss really is.

I have over five thousand hours piloting the old girl and every take-off and landing is still an adventure. Even so, I love every obstinate angular cranky inch of her, or maybe it should be centimetre, because she is designed (reputedly by a committee of six farmers) and built in Switzerland. Her engineers actually need two complete tool boxes. One with American tools for the engine and wheels and a metric one for the airframe!

Ernesto was the Chief Pilot of the large fleet of Porters which we were operating for the Swiss parent company. He had completed eighty-four hours of training with the little French guy by the time they arrived at my base in Zellah.