“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.
An opening excerpt from this chapter remains available here.
The full manuscript is currently reserved for submission and publication.
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.)
“Dressed for the Moon, Aiming for the Stars, Crashing Somewhere in Between”
The jacket said pilot. The face said ‘unsupervised optimism.’
Here we see Marcel Romdane—delusional, determined, and dressed like he’s prepping for a moon landing—fueling the innocent little training aircraft that would soon become his one-way ticket to chaos.
This was no pose. This was me—truly believing I had what it took.
The pilot. The plan. The purpose.
Spoiler: I had the jacket.
Everything else was still... under negotiation.
Enriko, watching off-frame like a wildlife vet monitoring a rabid hyena, stood ready to jump in—should I misfuel, miscalculate, or combust from sheer enthusiasm.
But at this moment? I was unstoppable.
From Riches to Rags: An African Odyssey, Part VI – From Theory to Therapy: A Pilot’s Descent into Fabric-Bound Madness.
Behold “Plop”
— because nothing inspires confidence like the sound of something falling out of the sky. This flying shoebox became my personal chamber of aerial waterboarding: 60 hours of motion sickness, vertigo therapy, and Enriko’s encyclopaedic lectures that vaporised from my brain faster than my ATM PIN at a Nairobi fuel stop.
A Cessna so claustrophobic it made coffins look roomy and glove compartments feel luxurious — barely stable enough to prep me for the bureaucratic airstrikes and ballistic weather tantrums of African skies.
Of course, whatever aviation wisdom Enriko tried to transfer was promptly deleted the moment I found myself navigating with charts older than Mugabe’s reign and procedures that seemed drafted by Darwin in a hangover.
Welcome to FlensAir: where dreams go to nosedive, and pilots get Stockholm Syndrome.
There she stood—grinning like an idiot in high-vis paint.
The Super Cub.
A banana-coloured temptress with the aerodynamic charm of a WWII lawn dart and the seductive power of sirens with flaps.
I was doomed. Resistance was futile.
My brain said no, but my reckless, aviation-starved soul whispered,
Buy her. Fly her. Ruin everything.
And so began the great descent into fabric-bound madness, where common sense stalls harder than taildraggers in a crosswind.
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