The feeling/Nathan Judah

J.B. turned one of the radio knobs to the right, and my headphones added the theme of “Titanic” to the noise vortex that was banging against my eardrums. “You can try to distract me as much as you want…” I said laughing into the mike “…It won’t do you any good”. J.B looked satisfied, and he was wearing a small plotting smile across his face. I pressed the communication button that was positioned on the left part of the yoke and said “Jandakot tower, Foxtrot-India-Golf, Down-wind for Touch & Go”. “Foxtrot-India-Golf” answered the tower, and I started the required down-wind checks and procedures before landing the plane I was piloting.

 J.B was my flight instructor. I was his student. It is funny sometimes to think how life leads us. It was only a few months before that I was a married man, stashed in a lawyer’s robe crowded occasionally in a courtroom with dozens of other lawyers stashed also in those same silly black robes, like grown-up Harry Potters in the Hogwarts school of witchcraft. And there I was, only a few months later, a single man, in a single engine airplane, circuiting runway 24-left of the Jandakot Airport at 1,000 feet. I came to Australia to heal, and circumstances led me to be J.b’s student. I remember the 2 sentences that J.B barked on our first flight together, that made me confident that he should be my instructor… It was when the plane gained altitude due to some thermals that pushed the plane further from the hot ground… J.B’s method of instructing me to hold the planes altitude was by saying “The plane is like a woman…Fight the bitch…Don’t let her get away with it…” and then he added “If god intended women to fly, he would have painted the sky Pink…”. Yes, it would be fair to say that J.B. had a unique method of teaching someone to fly. I guess that it was that same uniqueness that turned on the “Titanic” theme in my headset at the Jandakot circuit.