Work is progressing slowly with the exhaust on our ground clinging old Auster – two sides of the exhaust stubs are attached and it remains to fit the new heat exchanger box and sure it all up. I’m not going to make one of my usual optimistic projections on when she’ll be flying again as there will still be the rest of the permit items to do once the exhaust is back on, so your guess is as good as mine! She’ll be flying again when she’ll be flying again!

So much of aviation seems to involve sitting and waiting and I wonder how much time I’ve spent over the years hanging around an airfield waiting for weather, an aircraft or just the faff that is entailed in getting airborne – in terms of ratios probably something like the order of 10:1 ( ground:air) and it’s funny how we tend to forget that, or conveniently leave the time on the ground out of our thinking when we talk about going flying.

Even having JT at a low bureaucracy local air-strip less than a ten minute drive from my house involves a seemingly disproportionate amount of time on the ground – ‘I’ll just go for a quick flight…’ I tell my wife – ‘I’ll be back in an hour and a half’. Right.

Three or four hours later I return sheepishly, hopefully having remembered to pick up the milk and bread on the way home…..you see, arriving at the strip, I might come across Bob and Jim, who had told their wives something similar and of course, we all stand about chatting for a while – the state of the strip, the wind, the best take-off run, our aeroplanes, the state of things in general. Finally we start the pre-flight ritual – pulling the machines out of the cramped hangar space, which is an act a little like disassembling a large three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle – putting the machine we had to bring out to access our own back in, locking up the hangar, doing the pre-flight – getting a little weather update etc – by the time we’re airborne an hour and a half has already passed! The situation is repeated upon landing.

It says a lot about flying, this – that lovely after-glow of a good flight somehow erases the perception of the amount of time ( not to mention money! ) we have spent to get it. It also erases the amount of time our machines spend sitting in the hangar not flying – undergoing some lengthy maintenance job – and don’t they all take longer than you think?

I’m hoping that flying JT again will erase the months of frustration we’re undergoing trying to get the thing airworthy again and I’m looking forward to that day when I’m stood outside the hangar, shooting the breeze with a couple of old timers, bathing in that mellow after-glow of a good flight. It will get here, because one thing you can’t stop, is the march of time.