“Kalli!!” I bellowed into the hangar like a man casually requesting tea after detonating a hand grenade in the living room. Kalli, blissfully unaware of the incoming catastrophe, was wedged under the cowling of a Cessna 172, elbow-deep in what I could only assume was mechanical witchcraft involving the nose wheel. He looked up, squinting like a mole dragged into daylight.
“Do you have some yellow duct tape by any chance?” I asked, as if that were a standard request in a facility dedicated to keeping planes airborne and not held together by stationery supplies.
He froze mid-ratchet.
“What do you need yellow duct tape for?” he asked, the suspicion already starting to bloom behind his eyes.
“Oh, nothing serious,” I lied with the easy grace of a career felon denying involvement. “Just a bit of paint came off the wing. I want to patch it up real quick—I’m not done practicing short take-offs and landings.”
Kalli sighed and began folding himself out of the engine bay like a battered patio chair on its last season.
“Let me see that paint that came off,” he muttered, like a man who already knew he was about to witness something that would haunt him until retirement.
We walked outside.
My Cub was parked with its “sunny side” facing the hangar, as if posing for a family photo while hiding a stab wound. From the front it looked almost respectable. From the side Kalli hadn’t seen yet... it looked like an aircraft that had given up. The right wing slumped at an angle of existential despair—like it had just received bad news from its doctor and was ready to be reincarnated as scrap metal.
“Didn’t you say ‘some paint came off,’ Marcel?”
“I sure did, Kalli,” I said brightly, gesturing to the chaos. “Look, the paint’s gone—on the right wingtip!”
He stared at me, then at the aviation holocaust in front of him. His face morphed through several phases: disbelief, confusion, grief, and something that looked dangerously close to theological crisis.
“What wingtip, Marcel? There is no wingtip. There is no canvas. There’s barely any structure left. What did you hit, the concept of responsibility? It looks like you flew through the Battle of Midway in reverse. And yellow duct tape? Seriously? How is yellow duct tape going to fix this crime scene?!”
I shrugged.
“I think it’s aviation yellow,” I offered, as if colour coordination might somehow distract from the fact I had effectively tried to murder an airplane with enthusiasm and overconfidence.
Kalli fumbled for his cigarettes.
It was his default setting whenever confronted with technical ignorance, mechanical heresy, or a pilot too confident to read the manual—so, basically, hourly. Given his permanent exposure to a potpourri of self-loving aviators, he was smoking more than a Chinese coal plant during a blackout.
“Okay,” he muttered, shoulders slumping like a man about to be told where the other wing went. “What happened?”
“Well…” I began, already gesturing wildly like a deaf-mute on a game show. “I was flying low and slow, just about to touch down, when—bam!—the right wing dropped. Out of nowhere. No warning, no nothing. Factory fault, maybe? Warranty claim?”
He just stared at me.
Cigarette clinging to the corner of his mouth like it, too, had given up. His eyes were glazed—somewhere between calculating the cost of repairs and bracing for the spiritual damage my answer was about to cause. He looked like a man watching a train derail in slow motion… knowing he was tied to the tracks.
Still, duty called. He inhaled deeply, already reloading the next question like it might be his last.
“How slow did you go?”
“Well,” I began, this time skipping the interpretive dance routine, “very slow, actually. I saw those Valdez STOL competition videos, you know? They come in at 20, 25 miles an hour…” I started to sweat like a priest in a brothel. “Maybe I was a little slower than that.”
Kalli blinked. Just once. It was the blink of a man who’d just survived a bomb blast, only to realize the second one was ticking under his feet.
“A little… slower?” he repeated, in the same tone one might reserve for the phrase ‘I fed the baby tequila but only a little.’
“Yeah,” I nodded enthusiastically, doubling down like any good idiot. “And hey, it worked fine on the last three landings! I mean, yeah, it felt a bit soft on the stick, but I figured that was just the air getting thin from how slow I was going.”
He didn’t speak. He didn’t move. He simply looked at the Cub again, as if willing it to vanish before it infected other planes with stupidity.
“So,” I pressed on cheerfully, as if I hadn’t just described aerodynamic suicide, “can you fix this? Like, quickly? I mean, that Cessna can wait, right?”
I beamed like a Labrador retriever who brought home a dead squirrel and expected praise.
“Let’s push your plane inside and after that, please leave me alone.” He sounded like a man on the brink of abandoning aviation altogether—one Google search away from becoming a monk, or a goat herder, or anything that didn’t involve patching up the airborne crimes of lunatics with pilot licenses.
“Come back next week. Not before.”
He muttered something unintelligible after we wrestled the Cub into a corner, where it slumped like a three-legged horse with a gambling problem and a head injury. Then, without another word, he slammed the hangar door shut with the finality of a judge's gavel at a war crimes tribunal.
I stood there, blinking in the dust cloud, mildly offended.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” I called cheerfully through the door, “just to say hello…”
He didn’t answer. It’s possible he didn’t hear me. It’s equally possible he was curled up in the tool cabinet, quietly weeping and questioning all his life choices.
“But anyway,” I thought to myself, brimming with unearned confidence and a total lack of aerodynamic awareness, “I almost mastered those short landings in a single day. Next time will be better…”
Narrator: It would not.
Flashback: A Few Days Earlier
The week had begun with the kind of dangerous optimism that usually precedes a natural disaster or a New York Times headline.
Enrico, my long-suffering flight instructor, had finally escaped—either to a well-earned vacation or a silent retreat in the Alps where he could cleanse his soul and scream into a bucket. The man had survived repeated, close-range exposure to my flying skills, which in hindsight bordered more on performance art than aviation. With him gone, I was finally unshackled—no more rules, no more lectures, no more instructor breathing down my neck like a vulture. Just sweet, unmonitored, glorious chaos.
And best of all: radio silence.
I immediately reverted to my favourite form of “aviation communication”: mumbling something incomprehensible before landing or taking off and ignoring everything else like a man refusing to read the terms and conditions of life. In my mind, this was perfect preparation for flying in Africa, where radios are often considered optional—right after seatbelts and common sense.
I fancied myself ready to ascend to the next rung of the mythical bush pilot ladder. I had binged so many hours of YouTube STOL footage I could’ve applied for a PhD in reckless enthusiasm. Chief among my heroes: Paul Claus, the Alaskan aviation demigod who practically flew his Super Cub into the womb. At the time, he had logged 28,000 hours in the wild; by now, I assume he’s approaching orbital reentry.
If I had a shrine, it would’ve been split between Paul and “Mad Dog Bill” from Hillsboro, Oregon—a man who once taught a class with one working headset, two working brain cells, and zero working brakes. Legends, both of them.
I watched Paul’s landings on repeat like a lovesick teenager binge-watching breakup videos. It got so intense that I’m pretty sure YouTube’s algorithm tried to call Child Protective Services on my behalf.
So, naturally—armed with 65 whole hours of flight time (my entire PPL training included—a solid five of which were in my taildragger, thank you very much)—I felt morally, emotionally, and spiritually qualified to imitate Claus’s every move.
After all, when asked the secret to short-field landings, Paul once replied with surgical intensity:
“Practice. Practice. Practice.”
Spoken like a man who wasn’t expecting me to interpret that as a death wish.
I was about to do just that. What could possibly go wrong?
However, because I sometimes get lonely when flying around—I had first noticed this during my first solo flight in training, when I found myself talking to the empty seat like a hostage negotiator—I convinced my wife that, for the sake of weight and balance (but mostly emotional support), she would be required to tag along on my first heroic attempts at mastering the intricate art of short landings. For this noble endeavour, I had elected the very same “secret” grass strip I’d previously terrorised with Enrico during our last few flights. It had survived so far. Barely.
Now, one thing about my wife—and I say this with the utmost respect, awe, and possibly a mild concern for her mental stability—is that she must be so bold and courageous that not even John Rambo, barefoot and bleeding in a Siberian snowstorm, could rival her intuitive death wish. How else would anyone—without hesitation—climb into a tiny, outdated airplane piloted by a freshly certified sky clown whose only real qualification was having survived his own training? This is what I call trust. And unconditional love. The kind only a Labrador or a cult member is usually capable of.
We pushed the plane out of the hangar just as Kalli wandered by, suspiciously sniffing the air like a war veteran sensing incoming artillery.
“What are you guys up to?” he asked, voice flat like someone trying to stay calm in the presence of explosives.
“Practice, practice, practice, Kalli!” I declared, practically glowing with pride. “We’re working on short take-offs and landings today!”
Kalli stared at me the way a surgeon might look at a patient who just swallowed a fork for fun.
“What does Enrico say about this?” he asked, clinging to the last thread of hope that someone, somewhere, was being responsible.
“How would I know?” I chirped. “He’s on vacation or in a coma—I’m not sure.”
With that, I gave a regal wave, started the engine—conveniently forgetting, once again, to shout “CLEAR!” like any responsible human being—prompting Kalli to nearly somersault into the nearest hedge, mumbling something that sounded suspiciously like a prayer.
Beaming with unearned enthusiasm—me, that is, my wife was scanning for emergency exits—we taxied to the runway at our home airport.
“Shouldn’t you say something on the radio?” Nicole asked, her voice now three octaves higher and vibrating with dread. “Isn’t that what pilots usually do—to, you know, not die?”
“Nah, worry not, Darling,” I replied with the reckless assurance of a chemistry student seconds before blowing up the lab. “That idiot in the tower couldn’t tell a radio call from a Christmas carol. Besides, I am the pilot!”
And with that declaration of doomed sovereignty, I shoved the throttle forward. The Cub surged ahead like a half-awake cow on a skateboard, waddling in increasingly artistic zigzag lines across the grass strip. Directional control during takeoff was, I admitted silently, definitely something I needed to read up on. Possibly in a hospital.
I have to admit—this is as good a moment as any for public humiliation—I am not, by any stretch of even the most generous imagination, a natural when it comes to electronic gadgets. In fact, my relationship with technology lies somewhere between open hostility and spiritual warfare. This includes, but is by no means limited to: smartphones (what’s so smart about a device that autocorrects “fuel tank” to “fool trap”?), TVs that require an astrophysics degree to switch inputs, video players I’ve threatened with pliers, satellite dishes that exist purely to mock me in bad weather, kitchen blenders with more settings than a nuclear submarine, and—to my eternal shame—even toasters, whose toast-launch timing seems governed by a malevolent random number generator designed in hell.
But chief among these electronic devils—the absolute king of my techno-nightmares—is the GPS.
Operating a GPS makes me want to jab myself in the neck with a plastic spoon. Not even a sharp one. Just bludgeon myself gently until the pain stops. Combine that soul-eating digital menace with airport identifiers that seem like someone spilled Scrabble tiles in a blender (ZXYF? K9UD? Really?), random terrain warnings, restricted airspace overlays, and the casual mention of ongoing armed conflicts I somehow failed to notice, and you’ll begin to understand why I decided—heroically, some might say—to become an old-school, paper-map-wielding bush pilot.
Charts and maps, now those I can handle. Beautiful, silent, unblinking pieces of truth. No batteries, no beeping, no bitchy robot voice telling me to "proceed to the route" while I’m already halfway to Mordor. And terrain, as a general rule, doesn’t tend to rearrange itself overnight. I figured unless a tectonic plate had an identity crisis, there was no need to replace my gloriously outdated paper charts. After all, hills stay hilly.
This confident rejection of all things modern, of course, came back to haunt me in Africa, when I proudly landed my plane smack in the middle of a vicious ghetto—oblivious to the inconvenient fact that the once-official airstrip had ceased to exist roughly twenty years earlier. A detail I might have noticed, perhaps, had I replaced my glorious pre-Zimbabwe-era (read: Rhodesian) map with one printed sometime after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Or at least one not stained with coffee, dead bugs, and whatever tragic remnants my dog sneezed on it.
But I digress.
“Why are we following the road? And why are we flying so low?” Nicole, sharp as a tack and unfortunately still conscious, had picked up on the fact that, after my impressively short takeoff run, I’d climbed to a heroic altitude of approximately five hundred feet—barely high enough to avoid being decapitated by suspiciously tall cows.
One casual, possibly-illegal banked turn later, I’d locked onto the comforting sight of a highway snaking off into the distance beneath us. Glorious asphalt—my makeshift IFR (I Follow Roads) solution. I figured it would lead me somewhere, ideally past the “secret” grass strip I was pretending to know the exact location of.
Why fumble with the GPS, you ask? Simple: I hadn’t read the manual. In fact, I didn’t even know where the manual was. I assumed it had died of neglect somewhere beneath the passenger seat, possibly next to a mummified sandwich. Manuals, in my view, are for cowards, lawyers, and people who write strongly worded complaint emails to airlines. I, on the other hand, was a bold aviation pioneer—channeling the unholy spirit of Amelia Earhart, but with worse navigation skills and a slightly more functional sense of direction.
“sweetheart,” I chirped with the smug calm of someone who has recently consumed lead paint, “I know you don’t like heights, and I simply don’t see why we should burn extra fuel climbing to 2,000 feet when we’re just going to descend again twenty minutes later. Isn’t it far more responsible to stay down here, low and efficient, just skimming the windmills?”
The windmills, I might add, were uncomfortably close and spinning with a vengeance, as if ready to dice us into scenic sunset confetti.
“Plus,” I continued, now fully possessed by the ghost of unqualified aviation decisions, “I have no idea what the place we’re going is called. Or where it is. Or if it exists. But I sort of know it must be around here somewhere. Trust me.”
Nicole did not reply. Nicole was busy communicating with her ancestors telepathically and preparing for astral projection in case the plane disintegrated midair.
“Oh, look!” I cried out, pointing excitedly at the green chaos below, “Those sheep! I know them! I landed here before. They probably still remember me—and the trauma! This must be the place!”
In my mind, I consulted my pre-landing checklist—the actual checklist, of course, still lying heroically abandoned on my kitchen counter, nestled between an unopened electric bill and a banana going through its final stages of decay.
“Let’s see…” I muttered, more for show than function, fully aware that Nicole—now gripping the backrest like it owed her money—was silently praying to every deity from Buddha to Beyoncé. But I had a theory: real pilots talk to themselves out loud. So naturally, I performed my ritual with Oscar-worthy commitment.
“Flaps—ish… throttle—ish… carb heat… somewhere.”
“Runway? Looks like one. Wind? Who knows. Vibes seem favorable.”
Then—bam!—a fence appeared out of nowhere, like a low-budget horror villain. I gave it a casual glance and muttered, “Probably a touch more throttle,” only to immediately regret it. “Oops, too much. Never mind. The fence appears to have survived.”
I was deeply committed to the illusion of competency, channeling the energy of someone who once watched a YouTube tutorial at 1.5x speed while folding laundry. That’s when the sheep started running again. Their instinct for catastrophe clearly sharper than mine.
“Wait, got it!” I yelled, slamming down onto the grass strip like a rejected NASA lander. We bounced. Hard. Then we bounced again. And again. Picture a drugged kangaroo on a trampoline made of regret. By the third bounce, even the sheep had stopped to watch, unsure if this was an emergency or performance art.
We finally skidded to a stop just shy of the far fence, which marked the dramatic conclusion of a 1,500-foot runway I had managed to use almost all of. Not because I needed to. But because chaos, clearly, is my flight instructor.
“Well, that wasn’t too bad,” I beamed, filled with the kind of enthusiasm only the clinically misguided can maintain, “Only about 1,300 feet we need to cut off and we’re golden. Paul Claus does it in 200 feet. So can I.”
Nicole didn’t respond. Her eyes were doing that thousand-yard stare thing trauma victims on documentary interviews usually have. Her soul had checked out somewhere around bounce #2.
I looked back at her with a smile that should have been illegal.
“Let’s taxi to the hut and get some coffee. The sheep need time to process what just happened.”
She said nothing. But I’m pretty sure I heard her whisper, “I just want to go home” under her breath—purely in a loving, grateful-you-didn’t-kill-us kind of way.
This is how the next three hours unfolded—like a slapstick death march choreographed by Leslie Nielsen. Takeoff. Bounce. Land-ish. Bounce again. Coffee break. Repeat. We turned that poor grass strip into a trauma-inducing trampoline circuit, only interrupted to let livestock evacuate or for Nicole to stare longingly at the horizon, contemplating whether life insurance covered “death by amateur aviator.”
By round three of caffeine and despair, even the cows began migrating to somewhere safer. Possibly Mogadishu. A goose gave us the wing-finger. A sheep filed a noise complaint.
And then, a crosswind decided to enter the group chat. Not a strong one. Just strong enough to ruin everything. Suddenly, every landing devolved into a one-wheeled Zumba session—like a Maasai warrior possessed by the spirit of Evel Knievel.
“No problem!” I shouted with all the cheery conviction of someone who’d lost touch with reality, as we hydroplaned sideways at 60 knots. Only the slightly damp grass kept us from ground-looping into the next dimension.
Nicole, white-knuckling my seat with a grip that could strangle a god, remained unconvinced.
“Gotcha, you little devil!” I yelled again as the plane veered alarmingly close to the so-called clubhouse—a tin-and-hope structure held together by rust, prayer, and possibly a cursed sandwich. Inside, a coffee pot jiggled in terror every time we passed.
“Nasty little buggers, those wind gusts, aren’t they?” I called over my shoulder, casually, like we were discussing brunch options and not actively starring in a deleted scene from Final Destination: Bush Pilot Edition.
Nicole didn’t answer, but I swear I felt her soul quietly slip out the back and try to Uber itself home.
By now, I was drenched in sweat, my shirt glued to my body like shame on a tax audit. Still riding the high of near-death idiocy, I chirped, “Might be time to head back—before we have to hitchhike home on a passing bus.”
I had, of course, completely forgotten to check the fuel. Or the oil. Or reality. I made a mental note to add “fuel monitoring” to the long list of pilot responsibilities I routinely ignored. I lost that note approximately twelve seconds later—somewhere between mentally composing my acceptance speech for “Most Heroic Pilot Who Shouldn’t Be Allowed Near an Airplane” and the creeping realisation that my guardian angels had clearly outsourced their shift to a group of unpaid interns to keep me alive.
There’s a classic bush flying proverb: “You start your aviation journey with two backpacks—one full of luck, the other empty of experience. The trick is to fill up the second before the first runs out.”
At that precise moment, I couldn’t help but picture my luck backpack wide open, inside-out, and flapping sadly in the wind like a pair of lost underpants on a clothesline. Experience? Gaining fast. Dignity? Long gone. Altitude? Negotiable. And yet, somehow, I was still airborne—held aloft by sheer stupidity, stale coffee fumes, and the legally questionable hope that this counted as “training.”
“Perhaps a different kind of landing gear damping system is up for consideration—if you’d like to keep surviving,” Kalli remarked dryly, visibly relieved we’d somehow taxied back in one piece and not as flaming debris being sorted out by a crash investigator and a priest.
I was still high on adrenaline and denial.
“What’s wrong with the bungees?” I asked, puffing out my chest like someone who’d just read one forum post and now fancied himself king of backcountry aviation.
“I mean, bush pilots have flown with those for decades without problems.”
Yes. Them. Not me.
Kalli gave me the same look you'd reserve for a man about to relieve himself on an electric fence.
“You see,” he began, in the weary tone of someone who’s explained this to more idiots than a DMV clerk, “bungee systems are for professionals. For you—and others who bounce their aircraft like a demonic Space Hopper—there’s an alternative. Something with actual shock absorption. Car-like suspension. You can slam it into the ground as hard as your ego requires, and it’ll still try to keep you alive. Not forever, but maybe long enough to regret your decisions.”
He raised an imaginary finger—either to make a point or to signal divine intervention.
“But if you can land on bungees smoothly—without cratering—you earn immediate street cred. Everyone watching will know: that’s a real pilot. Of course, you’ll need a bit more practice. Say, 300 hundred hours. Give or take a decade.”
I was already lost in mental math, calculating how long I’d need to fake greatness.
I remembered Paul Claus once saying:
“I’ve flown 28,000 hours in Alaska. That’s a long time. You can’t expect to do what I do with just 500 hours.”
Well, I thought smugly, you just watch me. I’ll be greasing short landings in 300. Crosswind or not. Hell, in 200.
Cue ominous thunder in the distance. Probably my guardian angels facepalming in unison. Because here’s the thing:
Stupidity, recklessness, and blind optimism are bad enough on their own. But fused together in one cockpit, under a helmet of unjustified confidence? That monstrosity has a name: Marcel Romdane.
Yes, I would eventually nail those short landings. But what I utterly failed to grasp was that landing technique is not the same as wilderness survival while piloting an airborne canvas contraption through equatorial chaos.
I didn’t yet know how to read invisible wind shears that could snap your wings like breadsticks. I didn’t understand the psychotic weather tantrums of the tropics. Or how to deal with surprise herds on the runway. Or that night landings lit by a pair of Land Rover headlights were less “romantic adventure” and more “unpaid suicide internship.”
I didn’t even know about the godforsaken tsetse flies that could pierce metal, shatter plexiglass, or chew through your canvas tail section like rocket fuelled termites.
But I was about to learn.
Oh boy, was I about to learn.
We left the airport behind like fugitives from the Ministry of Common Sense, driving down the road in stunned silence. Kalli probably went home to re-evaluate his life choices. Nicole and I returned to our place—though in hindsight, I should’ve been dropped off at a facility with padded walls and a strict no-WiFi policy.
Instead—preparing for the next day’s training session—I went straight to my laptop and dove headfirst into a rabbit hole of aviation lunacy. I binge-watched every second of Paul Claus’s backcountry flying footage with the religious zeal of a televangelist. I studied Valdez STOL competitions, bush pilot memoirs, Alaskan airstrip documentaries, bungee landing gear autopsies, grass types and African sand variations, the lifespan of acacia trees, the migratory habits of suicidal wildebeests, and the likelihood of bird strikes involving overweight vultures.
Basically, I inhaled everything short of aviation-themed fan fiction with the obsessive passion of a conspiracy theorist who just discovered Area 51 has a runway.
Then it got worse.
I began practicing.
Right there. In the living room.
Laptop in front of me.
Arms extended.
Mouth making airplane noises.
“Brrrrrr… flaps 30… oops, almost stalled again… damn, that treetop was a bit too close… what’s the hippo doing on my runway?… SQUEAK.”
Throttle hand twitching. Rudder feet flailing. Eyes locked on the screen as I mimed a short-field approach with all the poise of a hallucinating herbivore. It was, in every conceivable way, a psychotic episode disguised as professional development.
Nicole watched silently from across the room. At first, she looked puzzled. Then concerned. Then something far more complicated—like the look of someone mentally Googling “early signs of complete neurological collapse” and pricing one-way flights to Anywhere But Here.
Maybe she was still processing the traumatic reality of our little “practice session” earlier—bouncing down the grass strip like a deranged space kangaroo, narrowly avoiding trees, brush, and whatever wildlife hadn’t already fled in primal terror. Maybe she was finally grasping how catastrophically overworked our guardian angels must’ve been—pulling overtime, chain-smoking stellar cigarettes, frantically trying to prevent our story from becoming a flaming cautionary tale involving ambulances and airlifted body parts.
Or maybe, just maybe…
She was wondering how she ended up dating a man who believed that making airplane noises in the living room was a valid path to aviation greatness.
But I didn’t notice.
I was far too deep into my bush pilot fever dream, still trying to nail a textbook short-field landing in my own damn imagination. In my head, I was already in Africa—heroic soundtrack swelling, wind in my hair, my plane slicing across the endless savannahs like a low-flying demigod.
In reality, I was a grown man making “eeeeeeee—BRAAAAP—STALL!” noises while sweatily fondling an invisible yoke on a coffee-stained rug.
The next morning, I was back at the airport, interrogating Kalli like an FBI agent who thought he was unraveling an international terrorist plot—sleepless, caffeinated, and fully convinced that the fate of aviation itself hinged on the upcoming modifications to my aircraft. Two crates the size of retired Soviet submarines were inbound from CubCrafters, overflowing with upgrades so excessive they could’ve reanimated the Wright brothers just to slap me and revoke my pilot license retroactively. I was practically vibrating with anticipation.
The cockpit had already been overhauled at a nearby airport, redesigned to the intricate specifications of a Boeing 747—or at least what a Boeing 747 might look like if you handed Enrico a pencil, a bottle of wine, and told him to “go wild.”
And to be fair, it looked glorious. A handcrafted masterpiece. The kind of cockpit that made other Cubs weep in inferiority—so fancy it could’ve applied for its own mortgage. No expense had been spared. Wires, gauges, switches… stuff that lit up, blinked, and occasionally hissed like it had feelings.
Never again would I encounter a Cub with a cockpit like this one.
Also—never again would I install half of this nonsense.
Let’s start with the artificial horizon. A device designed to show your flight attitude. Theoretically. In practice, it showed nothing even remotely related to reality. Not once did it reflect what the aircraft was actually doing. Kalli had warned me. And, to his credit, he was right.
I never trusted it.
I never used it.
I’m not even sure I looked at it.
It was like having an aquarium in the panel—a nice touch, but functionally pointless.
Then there was the Directional Gyro. A serious instrument for serious pilots on serious flights that followed serious procedures. Which is exactly why it had no place here. It needed to be manually aligned with the magnetic compass every 15 minutes, which—let’s be honest—was about 14 minutes and 59 seconds beyond my attention span.
I aligned it once.
On the ground.
Then never touched it again. Ever. And why would I? I had figured out the GPS. That’s right. I cracked open the manual like an ancient spell-book, mumbled a few incantations, and got the thing working. Flawlessly.
So now, with the GPS humming along nicely—showing me where I was, where I was going, and approximately where I’d screw up the landing—I had rendered the entire DG panel completely obsolete.
Looking back, instead of this glowing, backlit paperweight, I should’ve installed something far more useful in that spot.
Like an ashtray.
Or a coffee dispenser.
Or maybe just a laminated card that said: “Don’t Panic—You Were Lost Before You Even Took Off.”
Eventually, Kalli shoved me out of his hangar—firmly, like a man escorting a ticking briefcase out of a kindergarten—mumbling something about having “actual aircraft” to work on instead of babysitting an aviation liability with a hero complex.
He did, however, offer one final morsel of sanity before my next descent into madness.
“Mind the wind today, if you’re going up,” he warned with the hollow tone of a man who knew his words would be ignored. “Bit gusty. Crosswind, too. But I suppose there’s no talking you out of it... is there?”
“Worry not, Kalli!” I beamed with all the confidence of a man holding a map upside down. “I’ve got it all figured out. I’m taking that cross runway—the one nobody ever uses. I wonder why that is, actually…”
Kalli let out the kind of sigh normally reserved for ER nurses and aircraft accident investigators.
“Maybe,” he muttered, rubbing his temples, “just maybe it’s because that particular runway is narrower than the food cart on a Ryanair flight… and shorter than a dentist’s patience. Are you sure you want to try that?”
“Don’t be silly, Kalli. I know what I’m doing.”
And with that, I fired up the engine—blissfully forgetting, yet again, to yell “CLEAR!”—nearly flinging Kalli into the nearest thorn bush like a man shot from a cannon. Because why announce disaster when you can let it introduce itself with a scream and a propeller?
Off I went—into the wild blue yonder, strapped into my brand-new aircraft, armed with unjustified confidence, limited skill, and the unwavering support of a directional gyro that already wanted to resign.
I remember the day vividly. Bright. Sunny. Warm. And… well, windy. Quite windy. Still, armed with all the theoretical wisdom I’d inhaled about taxiing in gusty conditions—and blithely skipping the bit that said “when in doubt, don’t,” perhaps because there was no doubt in my mind—I was convinced I had it under control. The wind, granted, was a little stronger than I was used to, and yes, erratic—enough to trip more alarms than a weapons dealer walking into TSA—but I shrugged. “You can’t practice windy landings in calm weather, can you?”
Naturally, I chose the damp main grass strip—which allowed for a certain degree of sliding sideways—I was familiar with for the takeoff run. Twelve knots of textbook crosswind blasted across it like someone had left the fan on in a wind tunnel, but I figured my Super Cub could handle it. The more important notion of whether I could actually handle the wind somehow never entered my thinking loop—after all, what’s 90 degrees between friends?
Answer: Physics.
Despite shoving the stick fully into the wind and performing a tango with the rudder pedals, I was blown so far off course that by the time I clawed myself 20 feet into the air, I was already 50 feet off the runway—sideways. Grinning, I narrowly missed the pylons and the runway lights by the width of a bad idea.
Below me, Kalli instinctively recoiled into his jacket like a startled tortoise, one hand clutching his phone, already halfway through dialling emergency services. I’d buzzed his hangar so low he could’ve changed my oil mid-flight.
I waved cheerfully through my open upper door—something I had completely forgotten to secure, because my main checklist was… well, also where my GPS manual was: at home. On the kitchen table. Next to the toast crumbs and my last shred of common sense. The secondary, abbreviated emergency checklist I’d had the good sense to stick next to my panel had, regrettably, been blown out of the window—thanks to the draft created by the crosswind that was sucking everything not bolted down straight into the stratosphere.
I made a mental note to be better prepared next time. But let’s face it—there was never going to be a next time quite like this.
Once airborne, I decided to make a quick detour for a scenic loop over the ocean—because nothing screams “professional pilot” like wasting fuel to sightsee while pretending it's for engine warm-up purposes. In reality, I was just procrastinating like a student who alphabetises their underwear drawer instead of studying.
The engine, still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in its mechanical innocence, purred along, blissfully unaware that it had just been bolted onto a flying circus. Had it known what was coming, it would’ve ejected itself mid-flight, filed for asylum, and repurposed itself as a leaf blower in suburban Nebraska. Or maybe begged to be installed in a dumpster truck where at least its suffering would be honest. Anything—anything—to be spared the abuse I was about to inflict on it for the next three years.
Anyway—my hometown, a place so devoid of entertainment it could be mistaken for a soundproofed monastery, was charmingly nestled between the North Sea and the Baltic. I circled lazily for 25 minutes, admiring the scenery while sailboats below bobbed obliviously, apparently unaware they were directly beneath the most questionable aviator ever to graduate from a YouTube rabbit hole.
Eventually, I decided to stop dillydallying and get to work. The runway I had in mind—Runway 22—was short, narrow, and structured like it had been designed by a prankster with a grudge. It began with grass, transitioned to a stubby patch of uneven tarmac, and then went right back to grass like it couldn’t commit to a single material. Hitting those transitions was less like taxiing and more like skipping a stone across a pond.
Naturally, I didn’t consider any of the variables. Not the wind. Not the surface. Not the laws of physics. Instead, my brain looped an endless montage of YouTube landings—like a motivational video narrated by an enthusiastic motivational speaker. And because the runway crossed two major runways and hadn’t been touched by a sane adult in years, I figured I should at least pretend to be responsible and call it in.
“EDXF,” I announced with all the swagger of someone who had no idea what he was doing, “DEWRB, for landing on Two-Two.”
There was a pause. Then the tiny voice of the radio operator crackled through my headset: “WRB, please confirm Runway 22.”
“Yes, runway is correct,” I chirped back confidently—like I’d just pulled that number from a Friday night bingo tournament at a nursing home. I turned my attention to the landing sequence I had vividly memorised—or at least thought I had, because seconds later, I realised I’d overshot the entire runway by approximately half a post code.
“Flaps, check. Speed 45 knots, check.” Except I was so far off course I may as well have been trying to land in Italy. If Kalli had been watching from his hangar, he probably assumed I was doing a low-pass tribute to him.
“Alright. Again,” I muttered, convincing no one—not even myself. “Slower and lower this time.”
And lower I went. I came in so low I nearly shaved the tops off the pine trees, which started swaying like they were bracing for impact. I was bouncing along in the turbulence, the speed dropped below 35 knots, causing the plane to wobble like a shopping cart with three broken wheels, but—miraculously—I sort of, kind of, maybe landed.
Unfortunately, I landed in the third part of the runway. You know, the final grass patch that practically blends into the potato field beyond it. If I hadn’t yanked the Cub back into the air right then and there, I would’ve lawn-darted myself into a root vegetable grave and become the subject of a tragic agri-tourism legend.
“Never mind,” I thought, still high on leftover adrenaline and delusion. “At least I almost touched the ground this time. All good things come in threes, right?”
Right?
The third attempt turned out to be an absolute stunner. A landing so buttery smooth, so centred, so unspeakably perfect, I could’ve touched down on a birthday cake without disturbing a single frosting rose. Frankly, it should've had it’s own orchestral soundtrack. No tire marks, no bounce, just divine aviation perfection served on a platter of misguided confidence. Somewhere, a unicorn nodded solemnly.
The radio crackled to life.
“Wow, Marcel,” came Kalli’s voice over his handheld, which he kept in his office for reasons that likely involved morbid curiosity or mild sadism. “That was a great touchdown. Leave it like that and come back. The wind’s turning psycho.”
And that, dear friends, is when I should’ve stopped. I should’ve taxied in, bought myself a beer, and retired a legend. But no—I had a god complex and a death wish.
“Oh no,” I chirped back, “I can do better. Shorter. Stupider. Watch me!”
With the kind of unearned bravado usually reserved for the unmedicated cowboys of the Ponderosa Ranch, I slammed the throttle forward, ricocheted across the runway seams like a twisting tumbleweed, and took off again—so low I practically exfoliated the runway lights and permanently traumatised a family of rabbits mid-brunch.
Climbing to 500 feet—not out of safety but because I believed altitude was for people with patience—I whipped the plane around and set up for another “landing.” At 30 knots, I skimmed the tree line close enough to offer unsolicited haircuts. Lower still, down to 25 knots—because accuracy is for cowards—and I reassured myself with the timeless logic of idiots: “Eh, there’s probably a margin of error on this airspeed indicator. They're never precise anyway.”
Just as I flared, poised to grease the mother of all landings and perhaps earn a standing ovation from nearby birds, the wind—faithless bastard that it was—vanished. Poof. Gone. Like a disgruntled employee on Friday at 4:59 p.m. What remained was me, floating ten feet above the earth like a confused weather balloon in denial. No lift. No power. Just raw, unfiltered gravity staring at me like, “You rang?”
Then—WHAM—the right wing slammed into the ground like it had been insulted. The tip smashed into the grass like a mic drop from the gods of aerodynamic failure, catapulting me into a one-wheeled dance of panic and terror. We bounced. Wingtip. Tire. Wingtip again. I stomped the rudders like I was exorcising demons, flailing in a cross between breakdancing and mild electrocution. Somehow—by sheer luck, unholy reflexes, or divine pity—I avoided a ground loop, nosing over, or spontaneous combustion.
The plane skidded to a halt. Mangled ego, bruised pride, possibly a dented wingtip. But we were down.
And you know what? I was proud. Shaken, sure. Possibly concussed. But proud.
Why? I have no idea.
The good thing—if we’re really stretching the definition of “good”—was that I didn’t need to clear the runway. Mostly because I was no longer on the runway. My pirouette of horror had launched me clean off the strip and into a nearby meadow, where, by some cosmic fluke, no sheep were grazing. (Though I’m sure a few seagulls filed trauma claims.)
I unfolded myself from the cockpit like a stunned accordion and crawled out to assess the damage. The left wing was pristine—arrogantly untouched, like it hadn’t even been there for the chaos. The right wing, however, had moonwalked sideways through earth and grass like a Wyoming snowplow. The wingtip had simply ceased to exist. Gone. Erased from history. In its place flapped a shredded flag of loose canvas, exposing wooden ribs like a crashed xylophone. Bent alloy curled in shame. Splinters poked out like a hedgehog that had seen too much.
Still, nothing I couldn’t fix—in my wildly delusional mind—with some yellow duct tape, recycled tent canvas, and enough safety wire to reassemble a dead satellite. The sacred African art of “just make it work.”
I climbed back in, taxied the hobbling mess across the field like a wounded goose, and limped it toward Kalli’s hangar. Which, of course, brings us full circle to the point where this whole grease-fire of a tale began.
“KALLI!” I bellowed into the hangar like a man requesting tea after detonating a hand grenade in the living room.
Kalli—still blissfully unaware that his day was about to descend into an aircraft-themed Greek tragedy—looked up.
“Do you have some yellow duct tape, by any chance?” I asked with all the calm sincerity of a man whose plane had not just eaten itself.
He froze mid-ratchet….
How long it took to get airborne again, what Enrico said when he returned from his sun-soaked vacation straight into this disaster zone, and how I remained blissfully unaware of the chaos I’d courted—or how narrowly I’d dodged certain aviation tragedy and possibly death—is a tale for another week.
Right on cue, the new parts from CubCrafters arrived—promptly and cheerfully, like a birthday gift for a gremlin. Lucky me: we could install all the shiny enhancements while casually reattaching the wing I had just sacrificed to the gods of slapstick aviation.
For now, this has been your regularly scheduled meltdown.
Marcel Romdane,
proudly—still no idea why—limping off.
Oops...that went horribly wrong.... Nicole, ready to bounce.... My glorious cockpit..... The baltic sailors still at peace...
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