This is much longer than my average post. After all it marks the fulfilment of a dream that began nearly 30 years ago. So you may want to save it for a quiet half hour in an armchair with your favourite tipple.
The story is for all subscribers - free and paying. The video (which is at the end) is for paying subscribers only.
For those of you who have read Bearly Surviving you will be familiar with some, though not all, of this tale. I hope you enjoyed it nevertheless.
It was the fulfilment of a decade-old dream. Earlier this week, on a windless morning, I landed my bush plane - a 1957 Piper Super Cub - on my very own runway.
I can’t say I wasn’t nervous. So as to clear the trees at one end I needed to come in three times steeper than the standard approach angle. And so as not to impale my aging bird on the trees at the other at a speed of no more than 42 mph.
But when I touched down on the dirt and brought the plane to a halt my doubts evaporated like the autumnal mist that hovers above our river on cold mornings when the sun comes out.
As I stepped out of the plane I was greeted by two grinning Estonians - one of them Janek, the brother of my late wife Kristin, the other his friend Tambet - and given bone-crushing embraces.
“Yulius Internasional Airport is now open,” Tambet proclaimed in heavy Estonian accent.
An inherited fear
My obsession with flying dates all the way back to the 1990s. It was born, paradoxically, of an irrational fear I inherited from my father.
During my childhood, I had it drilled into me that planes were an unnatural form of transport and could, without warning, break up in mid-air.
One of my father’s favourite stories was the retelling of an incident when a plane apparently ran off the end of a runway in Budapest with he and my brother aboard.
“Look, Daddy, cabbages!” my brother allegedly cried as the plane slewed to a halt.
Another tale involved a botched landing in Germany that so damaged the plane that the baggage doors couldn’t be opened.
Doubtless the stories were embellished in the telling, but I nevertheless soaked all this up and became in time as bad an air traveller as my Old Man.
On the rare occasions we flew together, even when I was barely into my teens, we would both sit, white-knuckled, swearing profusely, and slugging back miniatures of whisky.
(Learning to drink, swear in several languages, and roll cigarettes seemed to be a part of the standard upbringing of the son of a Hungarian father in those days.)
The fear of flying didn’t fade with time and, even as I sought to make it as a foreign correspondent, I sometimes found myself more terrified of the flight in and out of some Balkan horror show than of the shooting on the ground.
I would arrive at a distant, breaking story half-cut even as my colleagues were poised for action, pencil and notebook in hand.
Doubtless my Dad was secretly proud that I was following in his unsteady footsteps, but it was a difficult professional flaw to hide.
The consequences were there for all to see in the mangled syntax and absurd adjectives in the following day’s newspaper.
I was not usually a heavy drinker. Really no more than a respectable also-ran by the elevated standard of my new profession.
But just the sight of a baggage trolley or a check-in desk would have me heading straight for the bar.
After one particularly egregious episode, when I flew out of Albania at the tail end of an uprising there, I collapsed, plastered, on a baggage carousel in Bulgaria.
It took Boris, a German friend and colleague with whom I frequently travelled, to scrape me together and get me home to Budapest.
I knew that this eccentricity had to end. But how? Therapy? Sleeping pills? Acupuncture??
In the end I decided to take the bull by the horns. So I signed up with a flying club outside Budapest. I would, I decided, learn to fly myself.
If I could handle a small plane unaided, I reasoned, I shouldn’t be scared of sitting in the back of an airliner.
The Budaors Flying Club
The Budaors Flying Club, a half-hour drive from the flat where I lived in Budapest, was an odd sort of place.
It combined the entrenched corruption of Communist-era Hungary with a freewheeling, almost lecherous form of capitalism.
Everything at Budaors was for sale: the fuel, the planes, the licenses, the endorsements.
One ambitious young Hungarian woman I met was given a pilot’s license with only an hour of training in the sky after pleasing the examiner with favours the night before her test.
One of the icons at Budaors was Uncle Bela, a crusty retired fighter pilot in his sixties.
Bela spent his days sitting on a stool in the control tower, reading The Word of the People and lamenting the passing of Communism.
One day a nouveau riche Hungarian drove up in a sports car, blonde trophy girlfriend on his arm, slapped down a wad of cash, and demanded to be taught aerobatics.
Uncle Bela, was summoned from the tower in a pair of worn flip-flops, his yellowing toenails poking out.
“I’m not going with that old guy,” the young man said rudely. “I want the best.”
But Uncle Bela was the best and as he waddled off towards a sleek Polish-built airplane I saw a malicious green light come into his reptilian eyes.
Minutes later I watched as Uncle Bela and the brash businessman screamed vertically upwards, throttle wide open, engine howling.
Then Uncle Bela flipped the plane over, threw in a couple of loops and slowed into an inverted spin, an extreme maneuver which is especially hard on those in the cockpit.
When the plane landed and the glass canopy flipped open the rich young Hungarian sat motionless, vomit dripping from his gold chains and face white as a sheet.
Bela climbed out, said something inaudible to the semi-conscious passenger, returned to his perch in the control tower, and picked up his Communist rag.
As a rookie pilot wanting to learn the basics I didn’t warrant the attentions of Uncle Bela.
Instead I was paired with a shifty young man who was trying to build up his flying hours. Needless to say I was in a constant state of mortal fear.
From the time the wheels left the ground until they were safely down again, I would hear my father whispering in my ear: “You’re going to die. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Week by week, though, the paternal voice grew quieter and, despite my lack of natural aptitude, the instructor steadily walked me through the basics: takeoff, cruise, flare, landing. Slowly, slowly we made progress.
Eventually, after many weeks of lessons, I made my first solo flight. Incredibly I landed in one piece.
Next came the test for my Hungarian private pilot’s license, a ludicrous affair in which a pot-bellied pilot hopped into the tiny plane with a small dog and both promptly shut their eyes.
“If the dog doesn’t bark, you won’t fail,” my instructor whispered to me.
Flying with Mennonites
I now had a private pilot’s license, but felt far from confident of actually using it.
Like a driver who learns only on sunny days with no other vehicles on the road, I was the fairest of fair weather pilots. I lacked experience, judgment and skill.
This was brought home to me when during my first flight with friends I ended up missing the runway altogether and landing in the weeds.
Nevertheless, over time, the flying bug slowly burrowed its tiny teeth deep into me. Planes were no longer just terrifying, but both terrifying and mesmerising.
And so, determined to fully master the art, I looked further afield for training where I could learn to be a proper pilot.
It was the early days of the internet and each night I would browse through websites about aviation in north America.
And the place I eventually found was a tiny operation in the Canadian Prairies where a crew of religious airmen, led by a man called Harv, taught missionaries and farmers the old-fashioned skills of flying by the seat of your pants.
I took an extended holiday from the newspaper, strapped $20,000 to my stomach to pay for my training, and headed off into the Canadian winter.
Harv’s Air Service was an odd sort of an operation. Based on the edge of a sprawling farming town in the frigid wastes of Manitoba, it was run by a family of Mennonites.
Their ancestors, facing persecution, had fled eastern Europe at the turn of the century.
Although nowadays they could all speak English, many of their number still conversed among themselves in low German, a dialect close to modern Dutch.
On Sundays, the day that most flying schools are at their busiest, Harv’s would close for business and the whole gang - owners, instructors and mechanics - would head off to church.
There were other oddities about Steinbach, the town that was my temporary home. There was no alcohol to be had at all. In the name of preserving its Godliness, the local residents had proclaimed the community officially dry.
If I needed a few beers after a hard day of cramming instrument approaches and flap angles, my only option was to drive to a bar outside the city limits and join the other bums and misfits who were not willing to foreswear the evils of liquor.
Harv’s flying school itself was constructed of a collection of small buildings.
There was a counter an one end where Betty, Harv’s wife, administered, took payments and filled out paperwork.
Near the entrance was a white board and when a student reached an aviation milestone it would be written up in marker pen.
“Congratulations, Joel, on your first solo.”
No exclamation marks, no fancy colors, just an unadorned newsfeed.
A lot of the students seemed to be called Joel or have other biblical names, and most of them were of farming stock from local villages.
When these salt-of-the-earth types passed their first solo - many of them went on to use their skills for crop-dusting - they would frequently head off to buzz their family farm or old school.
Any form of excitement or even emotion was frowned upon at Harv’s.
If you wanted to express enthusiasm for a fellow pilot’s prowess, a languid ‘Way to Go’ was considered acceptable but whoops and cheers were not.
After Hungary, where man and women regularly kiss total strangers on meeting, consensual groping at parties is considered everyday and extra-marital sex barely raises an eyebrow, Harv’s was a haven of puritanism.
Here in the Prairies all bodily contact would elicit embarrassment on the part of the recipient and ill-ease among others in the room. Even a firm, hearty handshake was considered flamboyant.
In all my time at Harv’s, even as students went through the intense emotional ups and downs of learning to fly, I barely remember hearing a raised voice.
The only time I saw even a flash of real emotion was when a French Canadian student, pawed by the school dog, cried: “Holy Crap, Scruffy, I’m eating my lunch.”
The room fell silent and it was left to Betty to rebuke the errant Quebecois.
“Charles,” she said firmly and to general approval. “Only God is Holy.”
There were certainly not going to be licenses for sex at this joint.
Looping the Loop
For all their social phlegmatism, Harv and his crew were unquestionably good pilots. They taught in a measured and unexcited way but had a fleet of well-maintained airplanes and excellent technical skills.
I had soon converted my dubious Hungarian certificate into a Canadian license and begun to learn Canadian air law.
In Hungary giving an air traffic controller an earful of abuse if his instructions were not in line with your wishes was considered fairly normal.
Here in Canada, I learned, even a four-letter word on the airplane radio was punishable by a term in prison.
I wondered what these gentle souls would make of a real Magyar insult.
Once, at the horse-races in Budapest, a punter had berated a jockey with the heartfelt: “Hold your mother while I f… her you prematurely-born prison bitch.”
Those standing around barely batted an eyelid. Such an outburst in Canada would doubtless have had the offender locked away for life.
My private license under my belt, I now set about the tougher business of getting a full commercial license.
This would not only allow me to fly for money, but also dramatically sharpen my skills as an aviator.
The minimum amount of time required for this upgrade was 200 hours. And that meant I needed a lot more time in the air.
So I decided to push the envelope a bit.
“Hey, Harv, do you teach aerobatics?” I asked the impassive Mennonite one morning.
I was thinking back to Uncle Bela and the elegance with which he had piloted his plane through the sequence of loops and swivels.
“Sure,” Harv said evenly.
And so a new chapter in my flying career began.
Every few days, in between bouts of ground school and evenings spent playing pool with the local low-life at the out-of-town bar, Harv and I would head up in a small tail-dragger and throw the little plane around the sky.
As the weeks went by, Harv coached me carefully through the basics of aerobatic flight, managing angles of attack, compensating for engine torque, figuring out g-forces.
And, when I had mastered those we moved on to simple tricks: loops, spins, aileron rolls and accelerated stalls.
Later, as my hand-eye coordination improved and my confidence increased, we tried hammerheads, an unnerving maneuver where you fly the plane vertically upwards and then, just as it runs out of puff, pivot around a point before heading straight for the ground.
With time, I proved adept enough at learning the various aerobatic techniques. But I still had one nagging and overwhelming problem. Fear.
I could pull off a series of funky tricks with Harv was sitting there with me if anything went wrong. I may not have shared his religiosity but I trusted him implicitly as a pilot.
But as soon as I was on my own, my courage would desert me.
I would take off, brimming with determination. And then I would summon up all manner of excuses not to put the plane into those crazy unnatural positions.
The weather was not quite right. The engine was running a little hot. There was too much other traffic around.
I was like a rugby player who wanted to be anywhere on the field except where the ball was.
For a while I would tootle around the skies and then come in again and land. And as soon as I touched down I would feel overwhelmed with shame and turn around and head up again.
Then, one day, my shame overcame my cowardice. Closing my eyes and gritting my teeth, I yanked the control stick back, kicked the rudder hard and felt the plane twist away to the left.
My first solo spin. I was elated.
When I finally got my commercial license, three months after I had arrived, I thought about staying in Canada.
But there was a new war brewing in Kosovo. The call of the frontlines proved too much and I returned to my day job.
Greased Lightning
For many years the flying bug lay as dormant as a bear in winter. My career as a journalist took me to Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Iraq and Chechnya.
But the little fella never quite perished. And when I moved to Canada with Kristin in 2005 and we began a new wilderness life, it began to slowly, slowly worm its way to the surface.
In the early years, of course, there was no time or money for aerial wantonness.
But then in 2012, flush after a few months in southern Afghanistan working for the British government as a political officer, came a leap forward.
I bought a home-built plane from a diminutive redneck in Oregon. He had constructed it himself, and a pretty slapdash job he had made of it too.
There were spots of glue and red sealant all over the place, many of the screw holes didn’t line up, the wings were slightly bent. The interior metal work was covered in a flaking black powder coat.
The exterior - perhaps to distract from its interior failings - was painted shiny black with red, yellow and orange flames on the wings, fuselage and nose.
It looked like an aerial version of Greased Lightning, the pimped-out car that John Travolta drove through a dry sewage canal in the classic 1978 musical romantic comedy.
I knew immediately that I saw the plane that buying it wasn’t a good idea. But I had the money and didn’t want to make the long drive back to BC empty-handed.
Two months later, after converting the plane to a tail-dragger (two big wheels at the front and one small one at the back) and fixing a few bits and bobs, it was, I judged, ready to fly.
I asked Thierry, the flight instructor in my nearest town, if he would come up with me for a couple of laps and sign off on my aerial competence, something required by the insurance company.
“But I have never even seen a plane like this before,” he protested. “And anyway I have no experience in tail-draggers.”
“I have lots of experience,” I soothed. “Just sit back and enjoy the flight and sign the paperwork when we are done.”
My new plane, however, was a feisty thing, fidgety and mercurial. No sooner had I lined it up at the end of the runway and pushed in full power than it began to skip, first left and then right.
Thierry’s eyes widened. Then I lost all control.
Ten seconds later we were wrapped around a sturdy metal fencepost. I heard a string of Gallic expletives from beside me. Sacre bleu. Mon Dieu.
Just the other side of the fence we hit - an obstacle that saved us both from a swim in the lake - a lady had been walking a small dog. When she looked up and saw the little airplane careening wildly towards her she began to scream.
Luckily just before we hit the fence the propeller blades stopped turning. Otherwise, rotating at 1,700 rpm and impacting a large metal pole, the plastic blades might have shredded all of us.
When the plane came to rest, Thierry and I sat dumbfounded for a few seconds. Then, as the smell of gasoline hit our noses, we scrambled out as fast as we could.
The plane, thankfully, did not burn. Instead it just sat there, battered and forlorn. I felt like a fool. How could I have been so cavalier?
And then an even more fearful thought entered my head. What about the local newspapers?
A plane crash, even one this pathetic, could be a major news item in this small town. Here even a council by-law on dog-walking could dominate the front page for weeks.
I imagined the headlines. “New pilot brought down by hubris.” Or worse. And then the knowing looks and whispers from people I barely knew. I began to panic.
“I’ve got to get the plane out of here, Thierry.”
He looked at me quizzically.
“Please….” I whined.
In the end three of us managed to drag the broken airplane clear of the fence. It was, after all, only made of fabric and some light metal and weighed less than 1,000 lbs.
Then, determined that no camera was going to catch me with my proverbial pants down, I hopped inside, turned the key and set off down the runway intent on hiding my embarrassment behind the hangars.
The fuselage and wings may have been battered but the engine was running fine.
But, just as I thought I might be able to hide my sordid act, I looked up and saw a whole string of emergency vehicles - fire, police, ambulance and the hazardous materials team - snaking their way through town, lights flashing.
When they reached the airport they turned onto the end of the runway and began to approach. I was heading the other way in my bent, little plane.
I had no intention of trying to take off, of course, or even fleeing the scene. But, I thought desperately, if I can just get the plane behind the hangars perhaps there would be no incriminating photograph.
For a few moments we closed on each other. But there was no way I was going to stop now. In this game of runway chicken I simply had more to lose.
Reluctantly the emergency crews pulled over politely and let me pass. Then they turned around and began to follow me down the runway.
The entire episode must have looked like a small, parochial version of the OJ Simpson police chase through LA way back in the 1990s.
Eventually I got to the hangars and rolled to a halt. The uniformed emergency crews climbed out of their vehicles.
“Hi,” I tried with fake jollity.
I was greeted with a wall of frowns. I felt like a schoolboy who has played a silly prank and is now waiting for punishment to be meted out by the forces of moral probity.
“I hear there’s been a serious fuel spill,” the Hazmat man began.
“Oh, just a few drops,” I replied defensively.
Eventually he got back in his emergency truck and left. Then the ambulance men followed suit - there were, after all, no injuries. The fire engine left. There was no fire.
Finally only the police chief stood there looking at me thoughtfully. “Have you been drinking?” she asked. I hadn’t, I replied truthfully.
For a moment she hesitated and then seemed to take pity on me.
“Well I guess I’ll just be going then…”
My very own runway
Thirteen years on and the plane with flames is ancient history. At least in my world. It ended up being rebuilt by a dodgy mechanic down by the border who, two years later, presented me with an extortionate bill.
Eventually I just sold the plane to him to settle up.
But other aerial mounts were to follow. There was a sleek white experimental plane I had for a couple of years and flew around the mountains at great speed.And then, eventually, I swapped that plane for the Super Cub.
And it has pretty much been love since day one. The cub may be drafty, noisy and rely heavily on 1930s technology. But somehow it is the right plane for me.
And so to the business of the runway.
I always knew it had to happen. Even as Kristin and I struggled through the early days (check out this post for a flavour) I began pacing out an imaginary strip in our front yard.
I spent hours on Google Maps, studied airplane performance charts (especially the ones with the most pleasing figures), and even at one point, egged on by Charlie Russell, a bear guru and friend, thought about putting a net at the end of my yard to bring me to a halt.
But however I tried to bend the trigonometry of our land to my will, the space was just too small. There would be one glorious approach - and no more.
And then, about a decade ago, another opportunity presented. Kristin and I bought 80 acres across the river from a friend with the help of a hefty mortgage. This land, I figured, might just support a short strip.
And so I contacted old Ron, a neighbour with an impressive line-up of vintage bulldozers and excavators.
“Can you make me a runway over there?” I asked.
“Yip,” he replied.
“Great. What will it cost?”
“I dunno.”
“How long will it take?”
“Dunno.”
In the end I agreed to pay Ron for a few days work and after that we would see how it was all going.
A week later, with trees and earth piled willy-nilly around the place, we inspected the runway-in-the-making together.
“Is it coming along, Ron?”
“Yip.”
“What will it cost now do you think?”
“Dunno.”
“How long will it take?”
“Dunno.”
And so I committed to another week’s work.
And that’s the way it went for a while - me impatient, Ron impassive, and the bill steadily mounting.
“Nearly ready?” I asked a while later.
“Nope,” said Ron.
“Why not?” I was getting exasperated.
“Gotta take off the duff.”
“The what?”
“The duff.”
Ah. The duff. Hadn’t thought of that. In fact I had never even heard the word.
“And, er, so, when this, ummm, duff is removed,” I said. “Will it be ready then?”
“Nope,” said Ron. “Then we gotta make road.”
“Make road,” I said in desperation. “But it’s a runway!”
“Still gotta make road,” he said.
And so the days went by. He scraped off the duff. He made road. And then, one day, with my bank account fast emptying, he called me over. I looked at the cleared piece of land stretching out in front of me.
“Well it’s nice,” I ventured. “But it’s not straight.”
Ron seemed to suck his teeth for a few seconds.
“It’s straight,” he said finally.
“It’s not straight.”
“Straight.”
“Ron,” I said. “Climb onto your digger, take a good look and tell me if it’s straight.”
Slowly the old man clambered up onto the roof of his large, yellow digger. He peered forwards and then backwards and then forwards again.
“It’s not straight,” he said finally.
In Ron’s defence the bend in the runway wasn’t all his fault. Shoehorned in between some immovable bedrock and the river bank this was the only path the strip could take.
But I hadn’t figured on coming in high over the trees, plonking the little plane down on rough dirt, and then having to make a handbrake turn on the rollout.
From the air it seemed even worse. In fact, two or three weeks later, as I made my first approach, it looked simply terrifying. Once, I tried. Twice, I tried.
The third time it seemed I might actually be able to get the wheels down. But by this time I was so far down the runway it would have been bounce, bounce and into the river.
That evening Kristin - who had been capturing my efforts on her phone - showed me the video.
“Your hands were shaking!” I said.
She looked at me lovingly. And suddenly I felt ashamed. So I swore quietly that I wasn’t going to kill myself in front of my wife trying to land a raggedy old plane on a poor excuse of a runway.
I gave up trying. And life took over. Kristin died in early 2020 after a mercifully short and unexpected fight with cancer. Covid closed the world down. And, for a while, I struggled.
Meanwhile small poplar trees began to sprout on the runway. And as the years went by and my attention was elsewhere they grew and grew.
And soon there was no more runway - just a greened-in bench of land with a mass of trees, some of them twice my height. The windsock I had put up in the days of high optimism hung limp and shredded by the weather.
Take 2
But - you can’t keep a good idea down forever. Or perhaps I’m just being stubborn. This summer, returning from Europe, I sent a note to old Ron. A week later he showed up in my yard.
“Time to have another go, Ron,” I said.
“I’m too old,” he replied.
But in his stead he presented a young buck called Nick.
“Been running a machine since he was 12,” Ron said.
So I gave Nick the job. And five days later it was done.
Two days after that I came flying up the valley on a beautiful morning. I made a high pass, and then a low pass, noting the lack of any good options if I messed it up. And then I set the plane up and began the approach.
50mph, 45 mph, 42 mph. Once over the trees I had to get down and quickly. But I couldn’t afford a wing stall. And officially the plane stalled at 40mph. That way, I knew, lay a short and violent end. So I just held the plane steady and waited.
As the ground came hurtling towards me I made the shortest of flares. I bounced once, hit the brakes, took the bend, and the little plane slowly came to a halt.
Then I flipped the old bird around and taxied back up the runway. I was so happy I could have kissed the two Estonians on the ground.
(I retrained myself. They were a macho duo and a slobbery kiss would probably have been about as welcome as if I had given Harv the Mennonite a smacker on the lips to celebrate my first aerobatic manoeuvre. )
Of course the whole enterprise is not over.
In fact it is barely beginning. Now I have to think about grading - the strip is a fairly bumpy affair - order a new windsock (just done), and make a plan for seeding it all with grass. (Otherwise the poplars will come back).
Then it will need mowing, a hangar built at one end, and maybe even a rudimentary passenger terminal (probably just a wooden bench).
But for now all that is in the future. And this week I am just going to revel in the fact that I landed my own bush plane on my very own runway deep in the Canadian wilderness. Even if it did take me a while.
*
To see a video of the landing click here. You can hear the nervousness in Tambet’s voice. This is for paying subscribers only.
Good for you Julius, what a tremendous achievement. Well worth the wait!
What a fantastic achievement & a great story. You didn’t give up on your dream & that’s really inspiring.