“Tell me again, please, Marcel—how this is even remotely a sound plan. Seriously—walk me through the logic, step by step—because I must’ve missed the part where you got kicked in the head by a zebra.” Shlomi’s voice, sharp as a lawyer’s letter and twice as judgmental, crackled through the line with the crisp authority of someone who had actually survived Africa—unlike me, who was about to treat it like a casual DIY project. I could practically hear his eyebrows folding into origami swans of disbelief.
I rolled my eyes.
“I’m on a mission, my friend,” I repeated—probably the same thing Napoleon muttered right before marching into Russia wearing flip-flops and carrying a baguette. I wasn’t done yet. Not by a long shot.
“I just came back from some coma-inducing scenic flight, and I decided—yes—I can do that as well. The becoming-a-pilot part, not the dreadful flying-over-potato-fields-in-Germany part, I mean.”
Silence. Only Shlomi’s breathing, which sounded suspiciously like he was trying to decide whether to call an ambulance—or an exorcist.
“Ok, Shlomi, listen!” I pressed on. “That weird guy in the newspaper? Practically begging for planes and pilots. And since I highly doubt the guys in the Mara—you know, the ones with that idiotic name that sounds like a rejected boy band—would hire me straight out of flight school with less than fifty hours on the clock... I decided to buy my own plane and bring it here!”
I declared it with the unfiltered enthusiasm of a toddler announcing he’s going to build a spaceship out of cardboard and parental neglect.
“They need pilots? Here I come!”
Shlomi, however, remained silent. For a long time.
Finally, he managed to share his wisdom—and unceremoniously declared:
“O.K.”
That was all. No lecture. No detailed dissection of my life choices. Just the hollow, exhausted tone of a man who had seen too many people strap themselves to rockets made of duct tape and blind optimism—and was simply too tired to stop me. Or more likely, he just filed the whole thing under “Spoiled Safari Traveler Plunging Headfirst into an Existential Midlife Crisis”—and moved on with his day.
“Well,” he said, right before hanging up and moving on to something far more intellectually rewarding—perhaps tending to his garden, flossing his teeth, or staring into the abyss while wondering where exactly he went wrong by ever answering my call—
“Let me know how it goes, Captain…”
Clearly, he wasn’t taking me seriously.
Clearly, I didn’t care. I was on a roll, greased with equal parts delusion and bravado.
That very week, I went to a flight school’s “Information and Introduction Evening” to figure out the intricacies of becoming a private pilot—because apparently, watching Top Gun once and surviving a scenic flight over German potato fields had made me feel eminently qualified.
Now, I was already intimately familiar with the soul-crushing snobbery of golf clubs, having been strong-armed into one a few years earlier thanks to my grandmother’s ironclad declaration that “as a businessman in our small town, you had to belong to either a boat club, a tennis club, or a golf club.”
All three options had roughly the same appeal to me as contracting open tuberculosis in Turkey.
Applying a crude variation of Sherlock Holmes' wisdom—when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth—I chose the golf club.
Tennis?
Let’s be brutally honest here: tennis is basically cosplay for rich girls pretending they’re training for the Hunger Games.
It’s a hobby for people who spent the morning riding a horse named “Butterscotch,” and then, after brushing the hay out of their hair, don a starched white outfit resembling either a confused chef or a clueless doctor, and then alternate between prancing on a tennis court and sipping vegan smoothies at the clubhouse bar.
Boat clubs?
Don’t get me started.
Boat clubs were—and still are—an unspeakable pit of human misery masquerading as “leisure.”
The idea of mooring next to some bloated imbecile who believes he’s Captain Ahab, despite never having ventured further than five nautical miles from his favourite waterfront cocktail lounge, fills me with a special kind of existential dread usually reserved for dental surgeries and Powerpoint presentations. Nothing says “maritime adventurer” quite like a polyester polo shirt stretched across a beer gut the size of a life raft.
On second thought, clubs of any sort have always appealed to me about as much as an extended vacation at a Soviet-era gulag—with fewer amenities and worse food.
Predictably, the evening was a nightmare—a full-scale, five-alarm, kill-it-with-fire nightmare. To this day, I feel guilty for dragging my wife into that pit of human tragedy purely for emotional support, like some traumatised war veteran who couldn’t face the horror alone.
In my defence (and I made this defence with the righteous indignation of a man desperately shifting blame), the entire fiasco was her fault to begin with. After all, she was the one who had gifted me that scenic flight in the first place. Sure, it was a logical stretch that could have outpaced a NASA launch, but it worked. She came.
The moment we walked in, it became glaringly obvious that this was less an introduction to aviation and more a communal support group for washed-up ex-Navy pilots clinging to the last pathetic shreds of relevance.
Their tales—dear God, the tales—came with the theatrical gusto of someone narrating their own grocery list like it was a Shakespearean monologue as they desperately tried to impress the civilian sheep that had stumbled into their pen.
Every second was a slow, strangulated death march through endless accounts of weather phenomena, fuel calculations, and riveting anecdotes like “The Time I Landed 2 Minutes Ahead of Schedule.”
The real kicker?
It was painfully obvious that these guys weren’t just doing it out of love for aviation.
Oh no.
They were doing it mostly to squeeze a few extra bucks out of their otherwise coma-inducingly boring retirements—the kind of endless beige purgatory where you rearranged your sock drawer six times a day, got kicked out of the house by a wife whose tolerance for your breathing had expired sometime around 1997, and ended up hosting imaginary radio shows in your garage, broadcasting war stories to an audience of empty beer cans and a slowly deflating camping mattress, while carrying on long, one-sided conversations with a World War II bomber jacket hanging limp from the rafters like a forgotten ghost.
We started out as a group of about 20 to 30 sacrificial lambs.
By the time the evening had finally dragged its mutilated carcass to an end, only about 10 remained standing—shellshocked, hollow-eyed, but somehow still willing to sign up for the course starting later that year.
Assuming, of course, that you could pass the terrifying medical exam—a rite of passage so daunting it might as well have included a psychological interrogation by the Inquisition.
I threw a quick, secret glance at my fellow would-be aviators.
A few of them were of such gargantuan proportions that I seriously questioned what kind of aircraft they expected to squeeze into—unless the flight school had a secret fleet of surplus Zeppelins or a loan agreement with the Royal Air Force’s C-130 Hercules program.
Either way, it was going to take more than standard physics to get some of these folks airborne without violating multiple international airspace treaties and at least one law of thermodynamics.
Looking back, it’s clear that from that night onward, some divine aviation entity—probably a disgruntled, chain-smoking angel in a tattered bomber jacket—decided to guide my every move.
Hovering over my shoulder at every medical exam, every written test, every bum-clenching flying lesson, whispering:
“This moron needs all the help he can get” before furiously scribbling cheat codes into the margins of reality.
Because, quite frankly, not a single one of the godforsaken topics crammed into the next three months of weekly lessons sparked even the faintest flicker of interest in my overcooked brain. Nor, and this is important, did any of it fall within the realm of my natural capabilities. It was an educational potpourri of horror—around 120 hours of pure distilled misery: weather patterns, navigation by Satan’s breadcrumb trails, radio procedures so bureaucratic they made tax law look like erotic poetry, airspace regulations, flight dynamics, physics, and other soul-mangling disciplines that, under normal circumstances, would have either triggered a catastrophic cardiac arrest or summoned a tumour so malignant it would have started filling out my testament for me.
And yet.
Despite the obvious signs that every molecule of my body wanted to crawl out of the classroom and die in a ditch, there was one blinding, reckless, utterly stupid vision that kept dragging me forward:
Flying low and slow over the endless African savannah, chasing down poachers like a budget Batman, snapping photos from the sky with the smug omniscience of a Demi-God.
It was the first time since I had mutated from a martial arts instructor into a tragically miscast travel agency manager that I felt something dangerously close to purpose bubbling up inside me.
A true calling.
A real-life quest.
After all, these mind-numbing skills were supposed to be part of the deal, weren't they? Wasn't that what Shlomi, that snickering bastard, had said? I was, as he put it so delicately, “a man without essential outdoor applicable skills.”
(Which is a kinder way of saying I would have been eaten by ants before surviving a single night in the wild.) He was right, of course. Taking artsy-fartsy pictures of elephants from the comfort of a $300-a-night safari vehicle wasn’t going to save anyone. But—maybe—armed with a pilot’s license, a sense of misguided righteousness, and an absolute disregard for my own financial stability, maybe I could actually make a difference.
Of course, at that time I was blissfully, criminally, homicidally unaware of the sheer, absurd, universe-bending amounts of money this little fever dream was about to consume.
Had I even caught a glimpse of the financial bloodbath ahead, I would have dropped that entire heroic fantasy faster than a live grenade. I would have happily returned to the gentle art of kicking overpriced golf balls into tiny holes while bragging about my score to anyone who couldn’t escape fast enough.
But I didn’t.
Oh no. I charged straight ahead, like a drunk rhino on roller skates, headfirst into destiny’s wood chipper.
Anyway, back to the introduction evening. There were four potential instructors present, none of them particularly inviting, all radiating an aura of profound self-importance, as if they alone were the final custodians of everything that mattered on planet Earth. In hindsight, this marked my first close encounter with the breed known as “flight instructors”—until then, my exposure had been limited to the occasional taxi pilot in Africa, the poor bastard tasked with ferrying safari tourists too fat, too sweaty, and too self-entitled to fit in the back seat without a hydraulic lift.
These were the types who had to endure relentless assaults from wide-eyed tourists desperately trying to force themselves into the holy grail of bush flying: the right-hand seat next to the pilot, where they could regurgitate half-digested nuggets of trivia they had absorbed from cable TV documentaries like “Ice Pilots” or “Bernard: The World's Most Boring French-Canadian Bush Pilot Aimlessly Roaming the Frozen Ass-End of Nowhere.”
Naturally, I always gave them—the smug, condescending pilots—and the hobbyist “First Officers” who treated every puddle-jumper like it was the cockpit of a 747—a wide and deliberate berth. And as I was about to find out, flight instructors made even the most jaded bush pilot seem like a bloody ray of sunshine.
To top it off—and in true “Flying Club” fashion, oozing clichés like a leaking septic tank—some geriatric gentleman (henceforth, the Prez) shambled up to the podium.
Draped in a navy blue dinner jacket two sizes too big, adorned with the obligatory stitched-on wings emblem (because obviously, nothing says “still relevant” like a patch), he looked like a budget airline mascot that had crawled out of a retirement home talent show.
Clearly desperate to recruit fresh human sacrifices to replenish the thinning ranks of their moth-eaten Club of Aviation Aristocrats, he launched into a speech so coma-inducing it could have been weaponised under the Geneva Convention.
He extolled, at agonising length, the virtues of becoming a member of what he apparently believed was the epitome of aviation culture—the Shangri-La of airspace associations, where polyester jackets and self-importance ruled supreme.
I fought the primal urge to strangle myself with my own shoelaces, just to make it stop. At the same time, my body waged a mutiny, trying to slip into a sleep so deep it probably would have required emergency CPR performed by Satan himself.
Silently, like some deranged Hindu priest trapped in an endless spiritual loop, I began chanting my mantra:
Africa. Africa. Africa.
Think of the elephants.
Think of the open skies.
Think of literally anything except the droning voice of a man who could bore a taxidermied duck to death.
Each syllable of his speech felt like another minute shaved off my life expectancy—another nail in the coffin of my rapidly decaying will to live.
And still, he droned on.
And on.
And on.
Because apparently, the only thing more infinite than space itself was this man’s capacity for irrelevant monologuing.
But I digress. None of the instructors exactly stood out like the heroic cast of a Nicolas Cage action flick—or even the background extras in one. They hovered in the room like moths circling a 40-watt lightbulb, each radiating the same oppressive aura of bureaucratic disappointment. It was less “Choose your mentor, young Skywalker,” and more "Pick your favourite form of spiritual waterboarding.”
Not that I had a choice anyway. In proper gulag tradition, the flight school assigned instructors to students—matching us up like bad Tinder dates destined to crash and burn. One look around the room and I realised: I wasn’t entering a noble brotherhood of aviators. I was being drafted into a slow, methodical descent into madness, locked inside a flying tin can with some resentful retiree whose last shred of hope had died somewhere between 1983 and his third divorce.
Eventually—mercifully, miraculously, somehow—the so-called “training” started. Naturally, we kicked off with theory lessons, because nothing says future Top Gun like being trapped in a fluorescent-lit broom closet in the dying days of December 2010.
Somewhere across the world, I could practically hear my friend Shlomi back in Nairobi rolling on the floor in hysterics, probably rupturing vital internal organs in the process. His ghostly laughter echoed through the crumbling remnants of my patience as our sad little band of over-caffeinated, tragically hopeful wannabe aviators convened for the first time.
The venue?
A windowless dungeon barely bigger than a public toilet, tucked behind the Clubhouse like a dirty secret. The air smelled faintly of mildew, despair, and broken dreams.
Here, crammed in like livestock awaiting slaughter, we were subjected to the Great Revelation of All Things That Go Up (and hopefully don’t come screaming back down immediately).
From the history of the Wright brothers and their glorified flying picnic table, to the sleek modern marvels clawing at the edge of the stratosphere; from jet streams howling over the North Pole to wind shear in the Sahara that could snap a Cessna like a breadstick; from the wonders of GPS to medieval course plotting that basically involved praying to the North Star while dying of diarrhoea—everything was covered.
And it was delivered with the soul-scorching seriousness of the Gettysburg Address, except delivered by a man whose charisma was somewhere between a DMV clerk and a prison ward.
It was horrific.
An endurance test so mentally corrosive it felt like being trapped in a nursing home bingo night—forever. If it hadn’t been for my desperate, whispered chanting—
“Africa. Africa. Elephants. Open skies. Escape.”
—I would have bolted out of that broom closet faster than a nun at a wet T-Shirt contest during Spring Break in Cancún.
Only the dream of Kenya, the bigger picture, and maybe the faint promise of not dying of boredom kept me pinned to my chair like a condemned man awaiting the sweet release of the electric chair.
Mentally charbroiled and spiritually curb-stomped by PowerPoint—it was January 2011 by now—and after four weeks of theory sessions that felt like Kafka and Orwell had co-authored the syllabus, I finally crawled into my first flying lesson, wondering if sanity was optional for pilot certification or just something they surgically removed during registration. Honestly, most of it is now rotting somewhere in my brain’s toxic waste dump, but I vaguely recall us buzzing over the frozen, depression-inducing potato fields of northern Germany in a plane so microscopic it made clown cars look like executive limousines.
We must've attempted at least 500 starts and landings, though it mostly resembled me sitting there like a parrot while the instructor manhandled the plane and my will to live. I spent most of the flight mentally galloping across the Serengeti, imagining anything—anything—other than breathing recycled farts inside that aluminium coffin.
To be fair, it wasn’t pure hell. My instructor—Enrico—was a halfway-decent human specimen, all things considered. During a lull in the terror, he asked the fateful question:
“Why do you want to learn how to fly?”
And like an idiot possessed by a drunk poltergeist, I blurted out:
“To glide over the Serengeti, harass poachers like a low-budget Batman, and save elephants.”
The look Enrico gave me was less ‘confused instructor’ and more ‘man contemplating how his life decisions had culminated in this airborne fever dream.’ It was the blank, dead-eyed stare of someone realising too late that the cockpit doubled as a padded cell. The silence that followed was not golden—it was nuclear. A full systems shutdown. You could almost hear the faint scream of his internal monologue as it clawed against the walls of his psyche like a dog trapped in an dumpster.
He said nothing—probably performing a quiet cost-benefit analysis of whether faking a stroke or opening the canopy mid-flight was the more merciful exit strategy. But alas, no ejection seat, no fire escape, just him, me, and the realisation that fate had handed him a sentient migraine with delusions of grandeur.
Still, after a month of flying we grew accustomed to one another—though not in any heartwarming, Pixar-end-credits kind of way. No. It was more like two death row inmates who stopped plotting each other’s murder because the electric chair seemed like a more efficient solution. By then, Enrico had come to the bone-chilling understanding that I hadn’t been joking, hallucinating, or suffering from altitude-induced delirium. No, I was serious—the kind of serious you only see in cult leaders and toddlers with scissors.
He had filed my Serengeti dream under “delusional nonsense,” right next to people who think crystals can cure cancer and that the Earth is shaped like a beanbag. But slowly, with the haunted eyes of a man who’s seen too much, he began to understand: I wasn’t just committed—I was clinically incurable. The type to board a sinking ship with full awareness, wearing a tuxedo, to play the violin solo while fire licked the rigging and rats were already swimming for shore.
Because unlike the masses who shout grand plans into the void only to crumble at the first paper cut from reality—I didn’t stop. I didn’t flinch. I walked straight into the hurricane, took notes on the barometric pressure, and when the storm passed, I lit a cigarette with the last flash of lightning and asked,
“Is that all you’ve got?”
And when it all inevitably collapsed in glorious, flaming failure, I would simply stare into the abyss, shrug, and do it all over again.
Wiser? No.
Sadder? Probably.
Stubborn? Absolutely.
Unstoppable? Unfortunately, yes.
Time passed. D-Day—the written exam—loomed on the horizon like a bloated, snarling cumulonimbus with my name etched into it in turbulent, flaming calligraphy.
The instructors, who tag-teamed our misery like emotionally unavailable substitute parents, never missed a chance to remind us that this test, this absolute juggernaut of academic sadism, was the hardest thing we would ever face.
Bar none.
Ever.
Nothing compared—not university finals, not surviving a tax audit, not childbirth, not passing through U.S. immigration on a one-way ticket with a beard and no luggage. This was the Mother of All Exams and even harder than trying to cancel your gym membership. The only way they could have made it more diabolical was to require it be written in Inuit.
They said a brain surgeon’s exam was a toddler’s stick-figure sketch by comparison. NASA? Bunch of half-wits in helmets.
Failure rate? 80%. Time to complete it? Eight. Gruelling. Hours.
We weren’t training to become pilots—we were clearly prepping to launch and command the Starship Enterprise through a black hole.
And yet, in spite of the statistics, the fear-mongering, and the fact that I still mixed up wind correction angles with my shoe size, I had this unshakable, utterly delusional belief that I would pass.
Out of our group of ten, statistically, only two of us would crawl out of this bloodbath alive. I assumed—no, knew—I’d be one of them.
Why? Not because I’m smart. Not because I’m gifted. Hell, I still forget where I park my car in my own driveway. I’ve met potted plants with better memory retention.
But deep inside—somewhere between blind arrogance and chemically questionable optimism—I knew I wasn’t doing this twice. There was no way in hell I was sitting through 120 hours of aviation death-by-PowerPoint again. If I failed, I wouldn’t be reapplying. I’d be faking my death and moving to Guam. I’d sooner volunteer as the in-flight snack on a Ryanair route through Mordor.
So I did the unthinkable. I pulled back from my business. For an entire month, I withdrew. I shut the doors to my office, silenced my phone, and only resurfaced for actual emergencies—though to be fair, the worst catastrophe that could possibly unfold in a Travel Agency is someone accidentally booking a safari in Syria or a vacation to Detroit instead of Dubai.
I devoted myself fully to the studies. Armed with caffeine, panic, and a pen that somehow always ran out of ink during the meteorology section, I trained. I didn’t want success. I didn’t crave glory. I just wanted out. And if brute-force determination and sheer fear of repetition counted for anything, I was going to make it.
And I did. Somehow—probably by divine administrative error or a glitch in the system triggered by sheer pity—I passed. In hindsight, I can’t recall how I managed to scrape through eight distinct subjects, most of which I couldn’t name today even under threat of public karaoke.
All I know is that the required score was 75%. Not a mercy pass. Not a participation medal for showing up. A full-on three-quarters mastery of obscure knowledge.
Compare that to the FAA’s laughable excuse for a written exam over in the U.S., where you're given 90 minutes, a chair, a mouse, and a pulse.
Sixty multiple-choice questions. Passing score? 60%.
Honestly, my Labrador could pass that thing with one paw tied behind his back. But I? I squeaked through this German aviation Gauntlet of Doom with a glorious, sweaty, underwhelming 77%. And statistically, that made sense. Me and one other poor bastard out of the ten emerged victorious, like dazed gladiators from a bureaucratic coliseum. The rest? Offered the comforting reassurance that they could return within the year for another round of sanctioned brain damage.
Later, we convened for a modest celebration at Enrico’s house—my former tormentor, now promoted to “host with alcohol.” He greeted me like a man who wasn’t sure if he was about to hand me a drink or call the authorities.
“So, Marcel, how did it go?” he asked.
“I passed,” I said, deadpan, like it was a traffic update and not a once-in-a-lifetime resurrection.
“Nice. Which subjects?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, well… what do you know—all of them, of course…”
The way he looked at me—like I’d sprouted antennae and started speaking fluent dolphin—was the moment it truly sank in. He realised, in real time, that I hadn’t been joking. I was going to glide over the Serengeti in a glorified glove compartment with wings, harass poachers like a low-rent vigilante, and try to save elephants. Not metaphorically. Not someday. But soon.
“Well then,” he muttered, as if expelling a demon from the room. “Time to go solo. See you tomorrow at the airport.” And with the kind of casual detachment you usually reserve for kicking out a drunk uncle at Christmas, he shoved me out the door.
Somehow, from that day onward, the dynamic between Enrico and me began to mutate—less Cold War standoff, more reluctant partnership forged in the fires of mutual despair. He started asking real questions. Genuine ones. Like someone slowly realising that the lunatic in front of him might actually do the thing and not just talk about it until arrested or eaten by a lion.
One day, as we walked toward another episode of Cessna-induced emotional trauma, he casually asked what kind of plane I was planning to use for my little African safari of madness. Which, of course, resulted in the blankest look this side of a stunned cow, followed by my usual confident declaration of having given it absolutely zero practical thought.
But as an avid consumer of cinematic delusion, I had decided—after watching Out of Africa with misty eyes and reckless impulse—that I should fly something equally majestic. Something that looked like it belonged in a museum or a war movie. Naturally, I’d set my heart on a Boeing Stearman. Because when you’re barreling toward doom, you might as well do it in style.
Enrico blinked.
“You know that was a Tiger Moth, right?”
“Yes,” I replied with zero shame, “but I’d rather chase poachers through the Serengeti on a malnourished mule wielding a broken umbrella than fly anything built in a country where they steep dead leaves in lukewarm water and call it a beverage.”
“Okay,” he said slowly, like one does to someone you’re trying not to spook. Then silence. A long, painful silence where he visibly weighed the cost of continuing this conversation against the likelihood of an aneurysm.
Finally, he gave it one more go. “If you buy a Stearman, you’ll need to buy an oil field too. That thing drinks like a divorced uncle at an open bar. It’s a stunning plane—but for what you want? Look into a Piper Super Cub.”
“A what now?” I asked, already halfway into our rusting training aircraft, clueless and entirely under-qualified to choose a paper airplane, let alone an actual one.
Sensing a rare teachable moment, he launched into an ode about the Super Cub: a plane made of canvas, stubbornness, and bush pilot tears, kept aloft by sheer force of will and navigated with compasses that still point north like it’s 1932.
I nodded solemnly. It was probably time to start caring about these things, considering my training was almost over, and I’d soon be solo with nothing but hope and poor decision-making at my side.
As if summoned by my utter lack of preparation, our loyal Cessna began sputtering mid-taxi like it had just been told its warranty expired. Enrico rolled his eyes and turned us around.
“Spark plugs,” he grunted. “Gonna need a damn chimney sweep in there.”
We limped to the hangar, a place filled with wounded planes awaiting their mechanical redemption.
And that’s when he shoved me lightly and pointed.
“There. In the back. That’s a Super Cub.”
I turned.
There, bathed in shadow like the holy grail of stupid ideas, sat the tiniest yellow plane I had ever seen. It grinned at me. It actually grinned, like Grover from Sesame Street had been reincarnated as an aircraft and was thrilled to be part of my next bad decision.
I stared. Once. Twice.
And that’s when it happened.
I fell in love.
Hard.
Helplessly.
Completely.
But that, dear reader, is a tale for next week.
For now, know this:
Marcel Romdane
Going on a honeymoon with a plane made of fabric, glue, and wishful thinking.
(And yes, I intend to bring her home without a body bag or a black box.)
Just look at that stupid grin! Not mine, of course, but the yellow Piper Super Cub....Below, my instructor Enrico inspecting what was to become my doom...
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