Excerpt: Shooting Magpies

Shooting Magpies

The idea did not come in a burst of creative impulse, it wasn’t even something I had ever considered possible for a normal human being to achieve. Starting an airline is really not the sort of thing that normal, sensible, sane human beings do.

I am not Richard Branson, not by a long shot. I am about as average as it is possible to be. I was born to normal sane sensible, middle class Scottish parents and lived my first 21 years in a normal sensible, middle class life. My life can probably be categorized as average underachiever at school. I never really got the whole idea of learning until it was far too late. I was much more interested in other stuff, and I suppose it is fair to say I was about as lazy as it is possible to be without being comatose.

From an early age I have been fascinated by aviation, it probably comes from being plonked in the cockpit of a Lightning at the tender age of 3 by my parents when we were visiting Leuchars air force base on the East Coast of Scotland. My parents had a friend who was in the Air Force and I can clearly remember being driven across the runway to see the aeroplanes when we went visit him. There was something magical about all the dials and switches, along with smell of a cockpit which is a heady mix of aviation fuel, stale sweat and excitement. I think every aeroplane I have ever flown has that smell to a greater or lesser degree.

After that experience I fell in love with flying. I had picture books posters, toys and as I grew up, started making Airfix kits of various aeroplanes. My father did nothing to stop my fascination, we went to various airshows in Scotland, mainly Leuchars and Prestwick, but I also remember going to an Army show at Bellahouston Park in Glasgow where the Army Air Corps did a display with their Bell 47 helicopters – which by curious coincidence connected me to a helicopter pilot I met when I worked in Nigeria. More on that later.

When I was 9 my parents had thoughts of emigrating to Canada, and so we went on holiday to visit family in Vancouver. We were to fly from Prestwick Airport with Canadian Pacific Airlines, and I can so clearly remember the excitement of getting up early ready to go to the airport. This was something so special at that time. Transatlantic flying from Scotland was still regarded as extremely exotic and all the way to Vancouver was pretty special.

Prestwick airport in the mid-1970s was Scotland’s gateway to North America, and as the airport marketing men have constantly reminded anyone who passé through there, the only place that Elvis Presley ever set foot on British soil. All very exciting I am sure you will agree.

However for me it was a place of magic and excitement. I was going to fly for the first time. Passing through passport control seemed like a portal to another world. Walking past the opaque glass sliding doors and into the area reserved for those lucky and special enough to be boarding an aeroplane, was one the defining moments of my young life. Pretty sad really.

The security checks were like nothing we have to endure these days, my grandfather who was travelling with us had a metal plate in his hip and a letter from his doctor was enough to exempt him from any checks. Simply stunning by today’s standards.

After security, we were held in the waiting area, until we were called forward to board. Walking through the rabbit warren like corridors of Prestwick only seemed to highlight the feeling of excitement. We then walked up a set of steps to the bright, noisy windswept apron area of the airport.

In front of me was a thing of beauty. Shiny aluminium orange and red. A Canadian Pacific Airlines DC-8. My God that thing was just the single most stunning piece of machinery that my young eyes had ever seen. As we walked closer to the aeroplane I held my father’s hand a little tighter. I had fallen in love for the first time and didn’t know what to do with these feelings. It was beyond exciting, as we got closer and the aeroplane became bigger, I wanted to walk around it, to investigate the inner workings of the beast. The engines just looked so powerful, somehow the whole thing looked like it was going fast even though it was standing still on a sunny day on the West Coast of Scotland.

Climbing the steps to enter the aircraft, Prestwick then as now had no airbridges, gave a view of the swept wing and somehow that seemed even more stunning. Walking through the door, the now familiar smell of coffee and Jet A1 burned itself into my memory. As I went through the cabin it opened my eyes wide but my mind even wider.

Sitting strapped into the seat, while being fussed over by a very pretty Canadian stewardess was by far one of the more pleasurable experiences I had had up to that point. There was still something very special about flying in those days. It was not the adventurous voyages of the old piston and turboprop aircraft, but there was still the frisson of glamour and adventure.

As the engines were started, the excitement made the butterflies in my stomach take wing. As the aeroplane started to taxi, the excitement was becoming almost unbearable, we turned on to the runway and the throttles were opened wide. The feeling of the acceleration was amazing. Being pinned into the seat was something I had never experienced before and I loved it. As we took off the sight of the earth falling away beneath us was almost indescribable. We had taken to the air and joined the Gods. Watching the Scottish Atlantic coastline get smaller and more distant was awe inspiring. Climbing above clouds to the sun drenched cloudscape was like joining an elite club in my mind.

As the aircraft settled gently into the cruise, the cabin crew began the service and again it was nothing compared to the days of Empire Airways Flying Boats when dinners were cooked on board using fresh ingredients and trained chefs, but to me it still seemed unquestioningly glamourous. In this day and age where Ryanair charge for just about anything that is not bolted down it seems almost incredible that the level of attention paid to passengers was so high. However that was the level of expectation then. It seems amazing that a business model can be broken down so completely in such a short space of time.

After a couple of hours children were invited to visit the cockpit. I was up there like a shot, and it did not disappoint. “The Smell” was there, and the incomprehensible array of dials, switches and levers were fascinating. I couldn’t stop myself from asking the pilots what everything did. After an hour, my father came to find me. I was the last child left in there and had asked the first officer just about every conceivable question and then some. I was totally hooked. The view out of the cabin porthole of an aeroplane pales into insignificance once you have seen from the front. There is nothing but sky, clouds and somewhere distant below, the earth.

Arriving in Vancouver after 8 hours was almost a disappointment, the gentle bump of an almost perfect landing signaling the end of my first flight. I didn’t really care much about the holiday after that, I just wanted to get back into an aeroplane and experience the amazing acceleration on take off and the magic of being whisked across the North Atlantic on silvered wings, feeling as thought it would be a simple task to reach out and touch the faces of the Gods.

School, was something that had to be endured. There was not really anything that particularly caught my attention. Even in Secondary School, there was little that I could really say was of any great interest for me. I wanted to understand Physics, but so little related to what I wanted to know about that it sort of only caught my attention to a degree. Somewhere in the back of my mind aviation was always lurking, but “common sense” kept telling me that it was an impossible dream; only those who became RAF pilots were allowed that dream. The only possible exceptions would be those who were so rich that they could afford to own their own aeroplanes.

School was never really a place I enjoyed, in any particular sense, and I found it difficult to understand what it was all about. Being a lardy-arsed gut bucket was an added affliction that didn’t really help me get through adolescence. So just to add to my geekdom, I had a fascination for trains. It was the romance that caught me I think, the power and the engineering. It was all so raw and it meant that I could travel. The ability to move form one end of the country to another

During this of course I suddenly started noticing girls., and my goodness there were a few to be noticed. Some who were obviously worth noticing and others who I only noticed in retrospect, which was a damned shame as there was one who I fell in love with so heavily that I daren’t even ask her the time for the fear of rejection. It became so terribly apparent to me during the rehearsal for the school play where I had to look down on her and my heart skipped a beat every time. To this day I still think about her and wonder whatever became of her. Last I heard was that she had become something intelligent in Marine Architecture, which made me like her even more.

Kirkintilloch is not the sort of place anyone would associate with anything interesting and with good reason. It is the very epitome of normal. It has a history, quite a long one, in fact. Unfortunately it is far too dull and dreary to relate here. It started off in the Roman period when the most Northerly point of the Roman Empire was in Kirkintilloch.

I can only imagine what what a poor unfortunate Roman soldier must have thought when he had been plucked from the warmth of a Mediterranean village and dumped in the fort along the the Antonine Wall, looking at the view of the Campsie fells through the drizzle of a typical Scottish day. I cannot imagine that it would have been a particularly pleasant experience. I suppose it would have been exciting in it’s own way – being on the edge of the known world.

After the romans left, nothing much is known about Kirkintilloch for another thousand years until King David of Scotland granted it Royal Burgh status and famers could bring their sheep and cattle into town to sell them. Not much has changed really except that the cattle and sheep have been replaced with stolen car stereos.

The Comyns built a wee castle where the Romans had done the same and the only remains are an earth mound in the midst of Peel Park. The Comyns picked the wrong side to back when Robert the Bruce decided to take on the might of Edward Longshanks and won. Robert was not the forgiving type and raised anything to the ground on COmyn lands and then handed them to his best mates. Which is how the Lennox family became so powerful in the areas around Kirkintilloch.

As time went on, there was little else to do until someone dug a hole and found some coal. Enough was found that some business people decided ti might be an idea to get the coal to somewhere useful, and so the decided to build a canal. Right through the middle of Kirkie. All of a sudden the town was a place of interest, industries rose such as inland boat building and iron foundries, such was the golden peiod of Kirkintilloch’s fortunes. So important was the town that he first railway in Scotland was built between it and Monkland close to Airdrie. All these places are now dreary dull towns, which have more to do with Buckfast than making a fast buck.