“Enrico,” I mumbled like a love-struck, deranged Othello revival crashing into a midlife aviation crisis, “you can’t be serious. This thing—granted, it has a certain deranged charm—can’t possibly fly. And even if it does, how could it fit a pilot, let alone a passenger? It’s minuscule. It looks like the unlucky offspring of a kite and a lawn chair after one too many drinks at an ultralight convention. If IKEA built planes, this is what they’d send you—flat-packed with two screws missing and a manual written in Swedish sarcasm.”
I was circling the poor thing like a hyena around a half-dead gazelle.
A gazelle with wings. Canvas wings. Bright yellow canvas wings. You know the type. The kind of plane that gives you the vibe of flight but also the creeping suspicion that a sneeze might snap a wing strut.
Enrico, of course, ignored me. That was his default setting whenever I opened my mouth. He was already poking around the engine compartment with the same solemn reverence Indiana Jones reserves for relics—or possibly for dead cats trapped in ceiling fans. I stood behind him, equal parts awestruck and horrified. The Cub was beautiful, sure. But so is a guillotine, and I wouldn’t fly one of those into the bush either.
Internally, I was spiralling. This wasn’t the dream. The vision involved a Stearman, a biplane so dazzling it makes vintage warbirds weep and retired aviators write poetry. I had envisioned myself soaring across African skies in open-cockpit bliss, wearing a silly vintage leather flight helmet, a silk scarf whipping in the wind like a WWII movie extra who tragically dies in Act II.
Not this.
Not this... lemon coloured bumble bee with wings.
“This can’t be it,” I muttered to myself. “This is not the aircraft that will lead a noble anti-poaching crusade across Africa. This is the sort of thing a retired dentist buys to ‘feel young again’ right before lawn-darting into a cornfield.”
Still, there was something charming about it. Something irrational. Something... suicidal. The Super Cub stared back at me with a goofy grin, as if to say, “Climb aboard, loser. We’re going crash-landing.”
And just like that, the rational part of my brain—what little remained after years of chaotic misadventures—curled up in the corner and quietly wept. Because deep down, beneath the sarcasm and self-preservation instincts, I knew the truth. I was already in love and this wasn’t going to be a summer fling. This was going to be a full-blown international incident with wings, the beginning of an aerial affair so stupid, it could only end in tears, engine failure, or both.
But at that point, I was still blissfully unaware of the hysterical havoc I was about to unleash on an unsuspecting aviation universe—chaotic, absurd, and stupidly fun. The kind of mayhem that starts with a smile, spirals into a financial black hole, and ends with someone yelling “Mayday” in four different languages while desperately duct-taping a wing back onto the airframe.
“Interesting,” Enrico mused, circling the yellow gremlin like it might bite. “I’ve never seen a brand-new Super Cub in here—hell, not even on this continent. Looks like your beloved karma’s already rolling out the red carpet.” He paused dramatically, gesturing to the absurdly perfect specimen as if unveiling a Fabergé egg made of scrap metal, canvas and dreams.
“A pristine bush plane, right on cue.”
Then he stared at me.
Not just looked—stared. Like he was waiting for me to whip out my chequebook, throw confetti and impulsively buy this flying flapjack on the spot. His eyes said,
“Go on, fall headfirst into the dumbest financial decision of your life. I dare you.”
And honestly, he had a point. I’ve always believed the universe has a perverse sense of humour—like it’s watching from above, headset on, popcorn in hand, orchestrating your dreams with the passive aggression of a vengeful air traffic controller. Sure, it’ll deliver exactly what you ask for... but only to see if you’re dumb enough to take it.
And here I was—apparently dumb enough.
I shuffled forward cautiously, eventually locating the so-called entrance—a mutant hatch/window situation that looked like it had been designed by someone who’d lost a bet during an aircraft design seminar and who clearly thought instructions were a government conspiracy. It creaked open like a haunted breadbox, and I took a peek inside. What greeted me was not a cockpit. It was a crime scene. An art installation about despair.
Dark voids yawned where switches might have lived, mystery levers jutted out at angles that defied both ergonomics and God. The gauge layout made no logical sense. I wasn’t sure if the design was meant for a human, an alien with octopus limbs, or maybe a sentient insect with compound eyes and no regard for symmetry.
It was chaos. Beautiful, unholy, aviation-certified chaos.
Eventually—or perhaps mercifully, for the continued survival of my bank account—our trusty flying school crate was patched up and ready to limp back into the skies.
Side note: This was also my first venom-laced exposure to aviation’s longest-running civil war: pilots versus aircraft mechanics—a rivalry older than most royal bloodlines and sustained by equal parts testosterone, delusion, and secondhand jet fumes.
Pilots—though not all, but certainly the tragically overinflated majority—tended to parade around like airborne nobility, floating just inches above the rest of us mere mortals. To them, mechanics were background noise. Essential, yes, like brakes or oxygen—but ideally unseen, unheard, and definitely unopinionated. Especially the ex-military types. These guys had spent entire careers barking at subordinates who were trained to nod, salute, and disappear. The idea of receiving technical input—let alone a “you might not wanna do that”—from someone in oil-stained coveralls with zero flight hours was about as welcome as a flaming bird strike to the windshield.
Mechanics, meanwhile, had boiled the whole battlefield down to one universal law of the hangar: most pilots were overpaid sky-princesses with inflated egos and the mechanical IQ of a butter knife. In their eyes, unless you’d flown an SR-71 Blackbird while playing Tetris on a malfunctioning radar screen and dodging Soviet missiles with your knees, you were just another high-altitude hair gel enthusiast with a God complex and a loose understanding of gravity. And even the SR-71 guys? Yeah, probably idiots too—just really, really fast ones.
The next day , brimming with delusion, I was back in the hangar—hand-in-hand with my future wife and, unbeknownst to her, the soon-to-be long-suffering co-pilot of the airborne psychodrama that would hijack the next three years of our lives. She had, through no fault of her own, become the unwitting co-star in what could only be described as a midlife crisis performed at 500 feet with no intermission.
Predictably, she looked about as thrilled as a canary in a bathtub. Radiant and rational, she was visibly suppressing the urge to sprint for the nearest exit. Her tolerance for flight was already razor-thin; even in a commercial airliner the size of a small country, the slightest turbulence turned her into a human hydraulic press—clutching my arm with such force that weeks later, I still looked like I owed money to a loan shark. Now imagine her reaction when I unveiled this—a flying banana hammock I had fallen in love with, stitched together with fabric, string, and the tears of wartime aircraft engineers.
“Behold!” I exclaimed with the caffeinated enthusiasm of a border collie that had just discovered double espresso. “Isn’t this beautiful?”
She blinked slowly at the canvas wrapped question mark on wheels, her face cycling through every stage of regret known to psychology. It was the face of a woman silently re-evaluating her entire romantic portfolio, deeply concerned that she'd somehow invested her life in a man whose best idea to date was strapping her into an airborne coffin with wings made from tarp and unresolved childhood issues. Her expression didn’t say “I trust you,” it said, “This is how people die in documentaries.”
In hindsight, there were so many neon-blinking warning signs scattered across the runway of my life, it’s a miracle I didn’t taxi straight into a flaming billboard that read: “Abort Mission, You Absolute Idiot.” Even now, years later, I sometimes bolt upright at 3 a.m., stare into the void of my ceiling, and mutter,
“What. Was. I. Thinking?”
But here’s the thing I’ve finally learned—through hard landings, broken dreams, and charred remnants of what once looked like promising plans: regret is the emotional equivalent of carrying sandbags on a sinking ship. At the time, with the foggy half-logic I had, I made the call. I threw the dice. And yes, I rolled snake eyes. So what? Dragging ourselves across the coals for what now looks idiotic is like punishing a younger version of yourself for not having access to a future you hadn’t yet face-planted into.
Besides—and here’s the real kicker—it was fun. Not “oh, what a lovely day at the spa” fun. No. This was unfiltered, napalm-slicked, borderline-deranged exhilaration. The kind of pulse-pounding madness that makes your ancestors sit up in their graves and mutter, “Well, that’s new.”
If I had known what I was triggering that sweltering day in 2009—when I, in a moment of either divine intervention or total mental collapse, wandered into the Kibera slum like a clueless tourist accidentally stepping into the director’s cut of Apocalypse Now—I wouldn’t have changed a damn thing. That orphanage, slapped together in the middle of Nairobi’s most infamous abyss, didn’t just open a door. It detonated it. With me on the wrong side of the blast.
What followed wasn’t a journey. It was a full-blown riot of the soul.
My old life? A padded coffin. A pleasant little coma dressed in tailored suits and business class upgrades. But this—this—was a straight-line shot into destiny, no brakes, no seatbelt, just a yellow bird in a dark hangar whispering seductively:
“Come. Buy me. Let’s leave behind scorched earth and stunned psychiatrists. Let’s melt your comfort zone into slag and set fire to every dull thing you’ve ever done. Let’s fly so high, you forget your name—and crash so hard, you remember what it means. I promise you: you’ll never again confuse survival with living.”
The upshot of all this babbling? I didn’t just leave my old life behind. I napalmed the bridge, laughed at the ashes, and rode the shockwave barefoot into a life that made sense only in the kind of dreams you wake from in a cold sweat—grinning.
So yeah. Regret? That’s a luxury for the bored.
I chose the explosion. And—I’m not even remotely ashamed to admit it—I’d do it again. Twice. With fireworks. In slow motion. Wearing aviators and zero common sense. After all, the past is a country with no visa extensions. You fly in, crash spectacularly, and then walk away from the flaming wreckage—bruised, broke, reeking of jet fuel, but weirdly... amused. Possibly concussed, definitely underdressed, and somehow missing one shoe.
Did I pay for it in the end? Oh, absolutely. Eventually, like some opium-hazed philosopher waking up in a ditch so deep it had its own postal code, I realised that every glorious second of that ride came with a bill. A huge bill. Handwritten in blood and Red Bull. And no, it didn’t accept coupons, frequent flyer miles, or emotional support animals.
Still—here comes the terrifying cherry on top of this flaming sundae of glory that has lobotomised my sense of balance and trapped my mind in a spin cycle that feels like it was installed in a cheap laundromat in Libya:
How the hell do you top living your dream?
Even if it was short-lived. Even if it folded like a low-prized lawn chair from Walmart. Three years, thirty years—what’s the bloody difference?Once you’ve soared that high, danced with insanity in a cocktail of purpose and gasoline, tasted the kind of raw, unfiltered, napalm-flavoured life that melts your previous existence into a puddle of irrelevant spreadsheets... everything else looks suspiciously like beige wallpaper and soggy toast.
So how do you keep going, when “normal” feels like a funeral for your soul, conducted by bored accountants in orthopaedic shoes? How do you pretend the mundane matters, when your new bar for excitement is somewhere between “soul-transcending chaos” and “riding a rocket bareback into destiny while flipping off gravity”?
What do you do...when your dreams came true, exploded gloriously, and left you standing in the crater—laughing, bleeding, and deeply sunburned?Search for inner peace, perhaps?
Sure. Right after I find my other shoe and a clean pair of pants…
I digressed…
“105,000 Euro is the price.”
The voice crackled over the phone, dragged through a thick accent from the darker, less touristed corners of Germany—where vowels go to die and politeness is optional.
“Isn’t that a bit steep,” I replied, “for an airplane older than me, allegedly ‘freshly rebuilt,’ but sporting a cockpit that’s missing more essentials than a Ferrari left five minutes unattended in the Bronx?”
I was stunned. I was actually speaking to the owner of the canary-yellow Super Cub collecting dust in our hangar. Enrico—having correctly diagnosed my aircraft-buying judgment as somewhere between naïve and suicidal—had laid down strict orders: under no circumstances was this flying relic to cost more than €65,000. Absolute upper limit? €70,000. Anything more, and I was being mugged in broad daylight.
“Nope,” came the reply, dry as gunpowder. “Plenty of interest already.”
“Well then, best of luck unloading it,” I snapped, and hung up—though not before agreeing to a test flight, because chaos and I have an open relationship.
“Sure,” he said. “Fly it. But if you crash, you pay.”
A charming business model: aviation roulette with a side of blackmail.
A few days later, Enrico sent me a photo of the cockpit.
Now, bear in mind—I’m not exactly the sharpest switchblade in the drawer when it comes to sniffing out pranks or hidden agendas. My intuition is more “potato with Wi-Fi” than “human lie detector.” So naturally, I stared at the picture with the intellectual depth of a goldfish pondering astrophysics.
After all, I remembered that cockpit vividly. It had all the structural integrity of Swiss cheese and the aesthetic charm of a Soviet fuse box. So I stared. And stared. And replied with the unshakable confidence of a clueless man on the brink of public humiliation:
“What is that? Why are you sending me a stupid picture of that useless cockpit?”
Enrico, I’m sure, rolled his eyes so hard he briefly saw his own brain.
“Marcel,” he snapped, “look at the altimeter. For Christ’s sake!”
“What about it?”
By now I was getting annoyed. I’d already mentally filed the picture under “Pointless Garbage,” right next to expired mayonnaise and Facebook.
“It shows 5,000 feet. Does it not?”
“Yes,” I replied, “Great news! Thanks for sharing. But what about it? Don’t rub it in that the instrumentation’s crap. I know that already...”
A pause. The kind of pause that silently questions your entire bloodline.
“Marcel. The altimeter works fine. It reads 5,000 feet… because I was at 5,000 feet.”
There was a long silence. My brain—God bless it—finally began to boot up like a 1994 Windows PC after a lightning strike.
“…Wait. You took it out? You used your airplane to test my altimeter??”
At that point, I could almost hear him sigh the way seasoned surgeons sigh when their patient asks if the appendix is shaped like a real pen.
“No, Marcel,” he replied, with the patience of a monk about to take up recreational screaming.
“It means I took your Super Cub on a test flight. She flies great, by the way…!”
I am afraid there’s more. See, it’s not that I’m particularly dim-witted. I mean, I’ve met dim-witted. I’ve flown with dim-witted. I’ve accidentally shared a tent with dim-witted. So no—let’s give credit where chaos is due: I’m not stupid.
Rather—and I’m spitballing here—my brain just seems to be wired like a Soviet washing machine: technically functional, inexplicably loud, and prone to bursting into flames the moment anything straightforward is involved.
Sure, I can grasp complex topics. I can memorise obscure facts, master bizarre systems, and debate the philosophical implications of time travel while balancing a spreadsheet that looks like a Sudoku puzzle drafted during a nervous breakdown. But hand me something basic—like reading the emotional tone of a text message or interpreting the painfully obvious signs in a cockpit—and you might as well be asking me to decode the Rosetta Stone using only finger puppets and regret.
Numbers? Fine. Trivia? Excellent. And I never forget a movie line. Ever. Which, at the time, seemed like a completely useless party trick—especially when quoting 1991’s Terminator II during high-stakes aviation discussions. But now? Now it’s my crown jewel.
Because if there’s one thing I’ve hoarded more religiously than regrets, expired passports, and questionable aviation paperwork, it’s horribly bad films. And a few good ones, buried in there somewhere like emotional support DVDs.
Turns out, that flaming garbage pile of cinematic misjudgment has blessed me with an endless vault of quotes, analogies, and metaphors so stupidly brilliant they’ve become the absurd backbone of my storytelling.
So yes—while most people store useful knowledge like tax rules, emergency contacts, or how to behave like a halfway functioning adult...
I possess none of that. But I remember every single line from Rambo III.
And somehow, that feels like justice.
Still not done. Because as if being mentally wired like a Muppet wasn't enough of a challenge, I’m also genetically incapable of planning, organising, or following any rule crafted by mankind that I fundamentally disagree with.
Plans? To me, they’re just optimistic grocery lists of things that absolutely won’t happen in that order—or possibly ever. That’s why I keep mine simple. Like:
“Hey, that looks like a great idea!”
And then I storm off into the sunset, fully on fire, convinced that I’ll somehow gather the missing pieces mid-gallop—like a rodeo cowboy picking up his hat and his dignity while being dragged behind a rabid bull named Consequence.
To sum up the portrait of me: I’m a man heroically sprinting into chaos with nothing but confidence, movie quotes, and a suspicious resistance to planning. I exist somewhere between a rogue philosopher and an ecstatic ferret in a flight suit. I’ve essentially weaponised dysfunction and turned it into an art form.
And honestly? This world of beige bureaucrats desperately needs more absurdly honest disaster-souls writing stories. This is exactly why I elected to share my secondhand embarrassment mayhem tales with the public: because every attempt to find a book that could give me cardiac arrest from laughter failed. So I thought,
“What the hell—I’ll write one myself, and have a great laugh while doing it.”
If reading mine feels like watching a Shakespearean tragedy directed by Quentin Tarantino and edited by a sleep-deprived goblin—then I’ve succeeded.
I digressed, again. Let’s get back to the test flight I was actively dreading to embark on.
Why?
Because Enrico, in his boundless aviation wisdom (and clear disregard for my sanity), had decided that in order to shine some light on the Super Cub’s capabilities and to “see what the Super Cub could really do.”
Which, in pilot-speak, meant: Take her up.
Waaay up. Like… stratosphere-up. Nosebleed-section, wave-at-satellites altitude.
Now, given my well-documented, deep-seated, soul-clenching disdain for heights—somewhere between “rational fear” and “existential meltdown with primal, full-body terror”—I couldn’t help but ask, in a voice already trembling with impending regret:
“So, uh… what do you think, Enrico? How high will this plane fly?”
He answered as if we were casually discussing the optimal setting on a toaster: “Well,” he said calmly, “that’s what we’re going to find out. And how long it takes to get there. I’ll call out every thousand feet, and you note the time. I reckon we’ll max out at 18,000 feet.”
Eighteen thousand. That’s not altitude. That’s a threat. I blinked. My soul attempted to eject itself via my tear ducts. When my brain finally rebooted, I laughed—nervously, maniacally, like someone who’d just been told they were being launched into orbit via lawn chair and weather balloons.
“Ha! Ha ha! I thought I heard you say 18,000 feet, which, if I’m not mistaken, is roughly the distance to the sun. That was a joke, right?”
Enrico looked at me like one might stare at an IKEA manual for a bookshelf named VAXÖL, written entirely in Klingon.
“No. I never joke.”
I sighed. Loudly. Defeatedly. Because he was right—he never joked. At least not in any dialect known to mankind. Meanwhile, my inner monologue had burst into flames. In the crumbling ruins of my brain, I was rapidly drafting a list of plausible maladies that could conveniently strike me down before liftoff. Pneumonia? No time. Appendicitis? Too obvious. Rabies? Tempting. Nothing plausible came to mind. Not one goddamn heroic exit strategy.
The sad truth? I was, once again, too healthy, too proud, and far too stupid to admit defeat and prepared for what was shaping up to be either a bold aerodynamic experiment…
Or my high-altitude cremation.
The next day arrived with the subtlety of a wrecking ball and the mercy of a hangover.
Too quick. Too bright. Too real.
Enrico and I met at ground zero of my aviation misadventures just as the sun began its smug ascent over the horizon—mocking me with golden optimism I did not consent to.
“Best time of the day for a test flight,” Enrico proclaimed with the unshakable conviction of a man who’d clearly mistaken hell for a weather report.
“The air is cold and dense. Plenty of power available for climbing.”
Fantastic. Perfect conditions for dying quickly, then.
He was already elbows-deep in engine oil and methodically circling the plane like a hawk eyeing a mouse—his ‘walk-around’ checklist so precise, it could’ve doubled as a surgical prep ritual.
I, on the other hand, was mentally negotiating with the universe, actively praying for divine sabotage: a suspicious oil leak, a loose wing strut, maybe a family of ferrets nesting in the carburettor. Anything to ground this glorified kite and save me from my high-altitude horror show.
But no. The damn thing looked pristine. Taut fabric, tight bolts, not a single blessed excuse in sight. Reluctantly, I climbed into the backseat of that charming deathtrap—an aircraft design that predates the Cold War and, I suspect, basic sanity.
“Comfortable back there?” Enrico shouted over the engine’s angry growl, already taxiing us toward our fate.
“Yeah,” I muttered. “About as comfortable as sitting in a palm tree in your underwear and bathroom slippers.”
His laugh crackled through the intercom, all warmth and amusement while I braced for a slow-motion catastrophe.
Then came the run-up. A drawn-out ritual that felt less like a systems check and more like an exorcism—magnetos, throttle, propeller, engine temperature, fuel flow, possibly tea leaves and goat entrails.
“DEWRB, clear for takeoff,” came the radio call.
And just like that—we were rolling. The tail lifted, the wheels whispered goodbye to Earth, and we were airborne after what felt like a mere 150 feet of run. Against all odds, it was… breathtaking.
The Super Cub climbed like it had something to prove, and for a brief, shimmering moment, I forgot my impending panic attack and grinned like a lunatic.
This was amazing. The hum of the engine, the rush of the wind, the tilt of the wings catching the early light—pure, unfiltered aviation joy. I was so wrapped up in the euphoria that I momentarily forgot we were heading for the outer bloody atmosphere.
We hit 1,000 feet before the end of the runway—launched into the sky like a cork shot from a champagne bottle full of chaos. It wasn’t a climb; it was a catapult. For the first time in my life, I got a taste of the kind of high that probably keeps real pilots from ever becoming dentists: that raw, unfiltered rush—equal parts joy, madness, and pure, unadulterated lift. Compared to our usual flying school workhorse—a sluggish, overfed and underpowered Cessna—the Super Cub felt like strapping yourself to a bar stool with wings and yelling, “To hell with the manual, we’re doing this live!”
It was nimble. Ferocious. Slightly unstable in the way that made you want to write a will and a thank-you note to gravity. And I? I was loving every second of it, grinning like someone who just found the eject button in a therapy session. Enrico up front, meanwhile, might as well have been giving a hotel elevator tour.
“2,000”
“3,000.”
“4,000.”
“5,000.”
Still climbing.
Each thousand feet felt like climbing one more rung up the ladder of poor decisions—except instead of falling, you just got lighter and more concerned about your blood oxygen levels. No divine punishment at the top. Just hypoxia, existential detachment, and the creeping realisation that I was closer to the moon than to making good life choices.
But the little canvas beast didn’t care. It lunged higher, like it had just remembered it left the oven on in the stratosphere. The engine roared—a sound somewhere between an operatic chainsaw and a lawsuit in progress.
“10,000 feet.”
We were officially higher than any of my academic achievements and nearly all of my dignity. Below, the Baltic Sea sparkled like someone had spilled diamonds across a flattened disco ball. The islands looked like they belonged to the Caribbean but had been rudely deported to Viking territory.
“11,000 feet,” came the voice in my headset.
The boats turned to specks. My clipboard fogged slightly as I jotted down numbers I was no longer certain were real. Through the plexiglass window, the world looked like a painting someone had forgotten to finish. I was floating in a tin can far above the world—except the tin can had fabric wings, tailwheel landings, and a pilot with suspiciously vague ambitions.
“12,000 feet.”
The ascent slowed now, easing from “rocket launch” to “very determined seagull.” I focused back on the clipboard, noting time, altitude, and creeping surrealism. It felt like the kind of calm you get just before a parachute fails to open.
“13,000 feet.”
Now I really started to feel alone. Enrico’s seat up front completely blocked my forward view. Not because of his size—he had the build of a long-distance runner—but because the cockpit layout had all the ergonomic brilliance of a refrigerator built in Rumania. I sat low in the back, somewhere between the fuel tank and the landing gear.
“14,000 feet.”
That’s when Enrico’s voice cut through the headset, casual as ever.
“Just a little more and we could pass right over Mount Kenya.”
Mount Kenya?
16,000 feet. Africa. Elephants. Volcanoes. Altitude.
My brain stalled.
We?
That we snagged in my mind like a fishhook. Since when was Enrico going anywhere? As far as I knew, his idea of adventure was trying a new brand of muesli. He didn’t strike me as the type to hurl himself into African airspace on purpose—unless Lufthansa lost his luggage in Nairobi.
I glanced out the window again, silent, as the propeller hummed its war chant. Was he planning something? A surprise safari? A midlife crisis with altitude? A covert side hustle flying tranquilliser darts for elephant charities?
Nothing about Enrico screamed “impromptu conservation hero.” Why was he flirting with the stratosphere and fantasising about East African landmarks?
I kept my thoughts to myself.
“15,000 feet.”
We were still climbing.
Straight into the unknown. Or possibly a deeply misguided friendship tour of the African continent. Either way, the air was thinning, the mystery was deepening, and the clipboard was starting to look like the least important thing in the world—it just highlighted how staggeringly pointless this altitude was for anyone who wasn’t a cloud.
“16.000 feet…”
Thirty minutes later, we were back on the ground—Enrico greasing in a perfect three-point landing on the grass strip like it was his personal driveway. But I was somewhere else entirely. Not physically—I was in the backseat, sweating, vibrating, borderline drooling—but mentally? Spiritually? I was still up there. Still riding the high.
It wasn’t the hideous, logic-defying 17,800 feet we’d clawed our way up to without so much as an afterburner or a mild apology to gravity. No, that was just altitude. What hit me—what altered me—was something else entirely.
It happened at 3,000 feet.
That’s when Enrico kicked open the split door like a man throwing holy water on a demon. And in that exact second, aviation stopped being a method of transportation and became religion.
A rush of air exploded into the cabin like a frozen sledgehammer to the face. Northern Germany in March isn’t a climate—it’s a punishment. And that icy blast? That was the slap that woke me up. The engine roared, wild and unfiltered, howling into the cabin like an old war song. The smell of raw exhaust filled my lungs—sharp, metallic, borderline toxic—and it was glorious. I didn’t care. It was the scent of freedom, rebellion, and possibly brain damage.
My lungs said no. My bloodstream said YES, MORE OF THAT.
There was no plexiglass in the way. No polite little canvas flap pretending to be a barrier. No glue, no insulation, no rules between us and the open world. Birds zipped past the open gap in the door—I could’ve high-fived a seagull if I hadn’t been so busy grinning like an imbecile. The roar of the wind was so raw it bypassed my ears and drilled itself straight into my spinal cord.
Below us, my hometown sprawled out, growing larger with every foot we descended. Cars became more than dots. Trees got texture. Humans turned from ants to actual people with errands and deadlines and utterly boring lives.
And then… the low pass.
We screamed over the runway at fifty feet. Fifty feet off the deck! The height where insanity starts to flirt with excellence. We dropped into a world where altitude is for cowards and altitude restrictions are bedtime stories for children. We weren’t just flying—we were charging. Imaginary gazelles scattered. Invisible wildebeest stampeded. Acacia trees—never mind we were nowhere near Africa—dodged themselves in pure reverence. The Super Cub didn’t fly. It hunted. And I?
I was hooked. Children I never had screamed with joy in the backseat of my mind. We tore across the runway like we were trying to wake the ghosts of pilots long dead.
This was it. This was the hit. The moment my soul got snared like a freshman at a frat party handed his first questionable cocktail. It rewired something in me. Short-circuited the part of my brain responsible for logic, checklists, and adult behaviour. I started to regard proper aviation procedures the same way one might regard a parking ticket from a city you no longer live in: technically valid, but who cares?
Flying by instruments alone, surrounded by clouds? What was the point? That was aviation for vampires. Hiding. Waiting. Simulating. Jet engines? Sure, they’re quick. But they miss everything. At this altitude, there’s no rush. No blur. Just presence. The world isn’t a smudge on a map—it’s a living, breathing entity you skim like a stone on a pond.
This—this unhinged, low-altitude symphony of recklessness—wasn’t transportation.
It was a ritual. A feral religion with wings. Not some gentle cruise in a polished airliner, no. This was sky combat with the laws of physics. This was artillery-grade joy..
I didn’t want altitude—I wanted proximity. Trees so close I could count their leaves. Billboards that needed dodging like enemy fire. Roads so close I could read license plates, judge fashion choices and critique bad haircuts in real-time. I didn’t want to go fast. I wanted to go feral. I wanted to hunt the sky, bare-fanged, like a man possessed.
And just like that, I was gone.
Hooked.
The rush had burrowed into my bloodstream like a parasite with a pilot’s license and a bad attitude. Ever since, every normal thing has felt like a punishment. Cars? Trains? Commercial flights with tray tables and in-flight peanuts? Insults, the lot of them. The world was now a flat prison of the grounded. And I was ruined. Airborne and ruined.
Yes, the Super Cub crawls through the sky like it’s dragging a boulder uphill in molasses. It’s not fast. It’s not efficient. It flies on pure spite and vibes. Continental plates shift with more urgency. But navigating one of these beasts low to the ground? That’s sorcery.
I’d need reflexes sharp enough to dodge birds mid-argument, and the spatial awareness of a ninja with a death wish. A divine insurance policy wouldn’t hurt either. Though, in all fairness, I’ve always had the lingering suspicion that a full battalion of guardian angels had been assigned to my case—working overtime, double shifts, just to make sure I didn’t accidentally set myself on fire. Again.
But dear God...
The rush. The sheer, soul-obliterating, logic-defying, common-sense-annihilating rush. And right then—wind howling through the open door, face frozen into a wind-burned grin, adrenaline thrashing in my veins—I knew.
I was never going back.
Looking back, I have to admit—begrudgingly and with only mild emotional whiplash—that I owe Enrico a thank you. It was his entirely random, entirely Enrico-style impulse to drag me into that low-flying Cub lunacy that detonated something inside me.
He was, in every conceivable way, my opposite: calm, patient, a man with actual boundaries and a high-functioning relationship with planning.
And yet—that moment.
It gripped my soul like a desperate splinter clutching the last eligible man on Earth. It didn't whisper to me; it screamed in surround sound with engine roar and wind shear:
This. This is what you were meant to do.
It sharpened my resolve like a prison shiv. I would finish flight school—check-ride, license, paperwork—just to immediately toss all that well-behaved nonsense overboard. Forget procedures. Forget logic. Africa was calling, and she wasn’t asking politely.
I couldn’t wait to torch my life.
Yes, it was another hilariously overheated, tragically undercooked move on my part.
In hindsight? I should have paced myself. Drafted a strategy. Made some kind of—what do they call it—“adult” decision. Maybe even found someone responsible to guard my thriving business empire so I didn’t have to return years later like a feral cat crawling out of the jungle, sunburned and bankrupt, begging for a cup of coffee and a second chance.
But of course, I didn’t do any of that. Because me being me, I never plan an exit when I’m halfway through the entrance. And on a molecular level, I’ve always believed this: If the bridge behind you is still intact, you might just be dumb enough to cross back over it. But if you burn it—really scorch it, with napalm and bad decisions—you’ll have no choice but to keep going forward. No regrouping. No return. Just you, your stupidity, and whatever continent you land on next.
“Eighty-five thousand and she’s yours,” came the voice through my phone speaker, monotone and lifeless, as if uttered from a damp crypt in some dark and medieval corner of Germany where joy goes to die and sarcasm is punishable by flogging.
I was on the line—again—with the tragically apathetic owner of the yellow bird. The only reason he’d acquired the Cub in the first place was because there had been extra room in the shipping container. The man had flown to Florida, purchased an orange Pitts aerobatic biplane—basically a flying blender for adrenaline junkies—and, with a deep sigh and a shrug, tossed the Cub in the container like a forgotten throw pillow from the aviation clearance aisle.
“It was freshly rebuilt,” he’d claimed.
Translation: it had probably been reassembled by someone whose previous job was operating the Lucky-Wheel at a traveling circus.
“The engine is new, you know? That alone is worth forty grand.”
“Oh, that’s great,” I replied, deadpan. “I’ll just take the engine then, and go find a proper Super Cub somewhere else. One that doesn’t require a mortgage just to make the cockpit not look like the inside of an East-German tractor.”
I continued, gaining momentum like a sarcasm-fuelled freight train:
“The tanks are vintage, sure—vintage in the sense they were probably salvaged off a World War II trainer that crash-landed in a cornfield. The landing gear is a health hazard. The wings are as crooked as a Balkan politician. The altimeter’s got the personality of a depressed potato, the compass points toward the sun like it’s seeking spiritual redemption, and the airspeed indicator is clearly guessing.”
“Stop it!” he snapped, finally waking from his coma of indifference. “I’ve heard enough! Go find yourself some other aircraft.”
And just like that, click—he hung up.
I was devastated.
Not because I’d insulted him (that part was delightful). No—I was devastated because I was already head-over-heels in love with that stupid, overpriced, dangerously charming plane.
I looked to Enrico in desperation. He remained unmoved, perfectly serene, like a Hindu cow meditating on the futility of life.
“Don’t worry, Marcel,” he said with maddening patience. “He’ll call back. He knows it’s too expensive. He just hoped some rookie like you would throw money at it like it’s a Tinder date with wings. Trust me.”
So, reluctantly and with a heavy heart, I did.
It was the end of April 2011, and Enrico—ever the stoic flight whisperer—had been flying almost daily in a heroic attempt to hammer enough sense into my head to get me through the check-ride. We spent so much time in the air, I half expected to wake up one morning with feathers, start preening, and migrate somewhere out of sheer muscle memory.
Oddly enough, Enrico had developed a curious obsession with booking my training flights on the windiest days available. “Character-building,” he called it. I suspect he just enjoyed watching me get slapped around the cockpit like a sock in a washing machine. His logic? Africa—especially around the equator—has more wind than a Volkswagen minibus poetry circle in a California flower commune during cannabis appreciation week. So, might as well learn to dance with the turbulence early.
One of the final rites of passage was a solo cross-country: a self-planned, 250-nautical-mile triangle of a flight. I was to choose three airports, land at each, collect an official signature as proof that I’d survived the descent, and then return triumphantly—or at least unburnt. It was supposed to test my skills in navigation, time management, and not dying.
Of course, before I could take off, I had to perform a proper weather analysis. Now, as a future bush pilot, my go-to method would soon become “open window, stick head out, squint, and sniff.” But apparently, for the sake of exam protocol, that wasn’t good enough. Instead, I had to study actual charts, forecasts, and other sacred bureaucratic scrolls.
The weather turned out to be glorious—at least by our usual apocalypse standards. Barely a cloud in the sky. But the wind? Oh, the wind. Think Formula One wind tunnel, but angry. Still, the upside was delicious: I’d have a few precious hours of flying alone. No Enrico’s ominous sighs. No judgmental glances. No Italian sarcasm translating directly into flight shame.
So, off I went. Into the blue, into the wind, and into my final days of training—with some questionably folded maps, and a reckless grin to keep me company.
I don’t recall much of the actual flight, apart from two delightfully traumatising incidents.
The first one happened on my second leg, somewhere over the vast flat nothingness of northern Germany. I had apparently been blown off course by a few miles without noticing—probably daydreaming about my future Super Cub, or mentally composing an epic ballad about ditching adulthood and becoming a bush pilot in a place where flip-flops are considered official footwear. Thankfully, the controller at my destination caught my wandering signal and guided me in by pointing out visual landmarks. Not that I recognised any of them, but still, I nodded into the radio like a lamebrain. With his help, I narrowly avoided colliding with windmills, radio towers, or stray cows with very unfortunate timing.
The second incident? Oh, that was the real showstopper.
Upon arrival at the tiny coastal airstrip, the controller greeted me with the kind of voice one uses to announce a national disaster:
“Wind twenty knots, forty-five degree crosswind. That’s… more than you're trained for, right?”
He sounded like a man trying to politely talk someone off a ledge. I could almost hear him writing my obituary in his head.
“I suggest you fly back home and return another day,” he added, clearly unaware that telling me not to do something was the most surefire way to guarantee I’d do it—badly.
“Well, no way! Watch me, I can do this!” I chirped, brimming with the blind confidence of someone who had clearly taken a blow to the head and mistaken bravery for stupidity.
While he likely began mentally composing a condolence letter to my next of kin, I dove into my first attempt. It nearly ended with me as a flaming wreck buried in the brambles next to the runway.
“Uhh… whoops,” I muttered into the radio. “That didn’t work out so good.”
By now, the poor controller was probably curled into a foetal position beneath his desk, reconsidering all his life choices and whatever sacrilegious act he must’ve committed to deserve me as today’s entertainment.
“Here I go again,” I announced cheerfully, sounding far too upbeat for someone who had just tried to murder an airport with a Cessna.
Attempt two was worse. I barely missed his control tower by what can only be described as the exact number of hairs left on his head. I imagine he was either diving out a window or checking the small print in his will.
“All good things come in threes!” I proclaimed like a deranged motivational speaker as I lined up for a third approach.
This time—for maximum theatrical effect—I came in so low I nearly shaved the runway dike clean off. I pulled the protesting, asthmatic aircraft up at the last second, slammed it down hard on one wheel, skidded across the tarmac like a suicidal taxi on fire—screeching, twitching, bleeding rubber and shame—before collapsing into a final, wheezing halt.
Drenched in sweat but riding an absolute high, I jumped out, bolted up the tower stairs, and came face to face with the controller. He looked like a man who had just witnessed the resurrection of the Antichrist—with wings.
“You are mad, son,” he whispered, visibly shaken. “I have never seen a landing—no, three attempted murders of a landing—quite like that. Good luck in your aviation career… and for the love of God, don’t ever come back here again.”
With trembling hands, he signed my logbook, crossed himself like I’d just flown in trailing flames and demonic intent, and shooed me out of his office with the urgency of a man trying to unsee what he’d just seen.
Me? I loved it. The thrill. The danger. The sheer madness of it all.
And this? This was just the beginning.
How I ended up as the proud—yet utterly unsuspecting—owner of that yellow heap of canvas and glue is a disaster tale reserved for the next chapter.
Marcel Romdane,
nearly declared a permanent landmark at the North Sea, signing off.
Pictures below:
Enrico checking out the Cub. The disaster of a cockpit Me, still grinning but not for long. My future wife only mildly amused....
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