Anything but Plane Sailing

A few years ago, I had a particularly interesting episode concerning a light aircraft Cessna 150. It was a catastrophic engine failure to be precise. When someone mentioned I should write about it, I dismissed the idea, I suppose because over the years I have encountered and endured so many close calls.Stretching right back to my childhood, incidents like drinking petrol as a very young boy, just escaping being burned to death as the ground beneath my feet caved in on a burning underground fire, nearly drowning at sea when unable to swim, and falling from a helicopter seemed almost commonplace. I narrowly avoided being cut in half by a huge bulldozer blade, was only a mere couple of seconds away from being burned alive in an armoured vehicle, and but a fraction of an inch from being crushed between two halves of a train, which left a black greasy mark across my back.Flying my Cobra glider one day, I was caught in and brought down by a thunderstorm. Having no option but to fly completely blind in torrential rain over a built-up area, I made a forced landing in a potato field sporting a meter-high crop. And I was once launched into the air sideways in a Discus glider, descending to earth in a horrifying crash at great speed, only to be encased upside down in the smashed wreckage. My life has been Anything But Plane Sailing.

Bryden Mossop lives in York, England, and loves to travel. "I still want to see over the next hill and the next and the next, and I’d like to fly more."