After the interview comes the never ending wait until you are told to report to the dreaded "first door the left" where you find out whether you've been RECOMMENDED for SFA. I emphasize recommended because after this stage a written report on each successful candidate is sent to a group of even-higher ranking officers who have the awful task of sortin out 75 people to give awards to from 800 or so recommendations.

Then one day back at school many months later, an official looking brown envelope comes through the post to tell you (hopefully) that you have been awarded a SFA and also when and where to report to undertake your training.

The next step is to report bright and early on a Monday morning to an airfield where two or three other equally nervous trainee pilots have assembled.

From here, the story becomes very intricate and time and space are lacking, so, to cut a long story very short, the actual air training consists of the following exercises in this order; use of the various controls and instruments, flying straight and level at different speeds. climbing and descending, medium turns (30deg of wing bank), stalling, (point of information here: stalling is not when the engine stops but when the aircraft is flying in such an attitude that there is not enough lift to keep it flying and it drops out of the sky: stalling is still the major cause of most 'light aircraft accidents), spinning, landing and taking-off; then the first solo flight generally a real anti-climax; different types of landings, more solo, approaching an unknown airfield, steep turns (up to 60deg of bank), forced landings without power (this is where the engine "fails" and where the panic sets in!). Then comes the cross-country navigation exercises - at some time during these it is normally necessary to contact a large airfield in the area, e.g. Gatwick or Farnborough., (One of my favourite memories of the course was asking Gatwick whether they had any conflicting traffic and they replied ".........and a Boeing 747 passing about five-hundred feet above you travelling East to West and there it was about eight hundred yards away just above my little single-engined two-seater transfer, making me feel extremely vulnerable).

There are three ground exams to pass - Aviation Law, Navigation and Meteorology and the last one on airframes and engines -, all. with a minimum pass mark of 70% and a maximum of 3 attempts at each paper, Finally there is the equivalent of the driving test - the General Flying Test which is taken by the Chief Flying Instructor (usually a very awkward gentleman). He wants to see you do everything you have learnt during the last four weeks to a satisfactory standard, which is normally fairly simple actually.

Once this has been done and the extra 5 hours (optional of course) are made up, the application can be made to the CAA for a PPL and one can end up, like myself, being able to fly but not drive!

From the experiences of both myself and Mark Kreckeler (who also did the course successfully) I recommend that anyone interested in flying take the opportunity of this Flying Award while it's still available - it's a chance-and-a-half of a lifetime!

Simon Bilton U6Sc Wy