So after over a year of planning and writing, Papa Kilo Part 1 is NOW available on Amazon! Below is an extract from the first chapter…

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CHAPTER 1

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THE END AND THE BEGINNING

It was July 2008, and life was great! After years of saving up and studying for my Commercial Pilots Licence and Instructor Rating, I had finally landed my first pilot job; a full time Flight Instructor position at a flying school in Florida. Given that I’m from England, where low paid Flight Instructors spend more time on the ground than in the air due to the not-so-great British weather, this was a pretty good gig.

I was now getting paid good money to train students for their Private Pilots Licence, whilst enjoying the sunshine and easy life of Florida. I was flying a lot too, usually maxing out at 100 flying hours a month (the maximum legal limit for a pilot). During the day myself and my students would be soaring above the Floridian coastline, practising various aerial manoeuvres and navigation exercises. In the evening we would all go out for dinner and beers. The social aspect was similar to that of going to uni. The only difference was that I was earning money, not paying money. I was more than happy to continue working at that flying school for a year or two whilst I waited for my first airline gig. More than happy.

Yep, life was great indeed. So you can perhaps understand my disappointment when later that year, Lehman Brothers and a whole bunch of other corporate banks which nobody had even heard of up until that date, went bankrupt. The following domino effect would lead to the largest global financial crisis of the 21^st Century. This was of course a bit of a downer for the subprime mortgage customers which Lehman Brothers and the like were indirectly ripping off; many of whom would end up getting their homes repossessed. But it also created a few issues for anyone looking for a loan, including the 90% or so of student pilots who couldn’t otherwise finance the £50,000 plus training fees.

Needless to say, given my particular profession, I was now slightly fucked. In December 08, myself and my colleagues had our pay cut, just before Christmas. In January 09, we had our hours cut. And in February? Well let’s just say, that was the final nail in the coffin. I had zero students. I checked my colleagues rosters; similar story. Asides from the occasional “trial flight” (a one off flying lesson which is usually the customer’s unwanted Christmas present), all of our rosters were empty. Myself and another instructor, Byron, talked about our futures over a beer one evening. Byron was a US citizen who’d just passed the pilot selection with the US Navy. Byron was going to spend his future landing F18s on aircraft carriers. Byron was going to be just fine. However I was a UK citizen with no A Levels, let alone a degree. Regardless of my flying experience, the RAF weren’t going to touch someone like me with a bargepole. To make matters worse, airlines in both the USA and Europe were sinking faster than a fat guy on the Titanic. Airlines were laying off pilots, not recruiting them.

Reluctantly, I packed my bags and returned to England. I needed to move back in with my parents whilst I looked for a new job outside of aviation. At 24 years of age, this was definitely a massive set back. Back home the only job that I could find was for a part time barman. Given that I had previously worked as a doorman before my first gig as a pilot, earning twice the hourly wage of a barman, it was a double slap in the face. But since my days of “working the door”, I hadn’t been to the gym in nearly a year. I’d lost nearly 15 kg of muscle mass from becoming a vegetarian (it was a bad idea and a long story). Even if I wasn’t as weak as a kitten on chemotherapy, my “SIA” licence to operate as a doorman had also expired and I simply didn’t have the money to renew it. But the barman job was still a job. And besides, at least behind the bar I didn’t need to worry so much about getting my head kicked in.

I would spend the next 2 soul destroying years of my life working random jobs outside of aviation. Eventually I found a weekend job as a Flight Instructor at my local airport. The pay for the weekend instructing wasn’t great, however on weekdays I had a job selling fruit and vegetables door to door. OK, it wasn’t exactly the most glamorous of jobs, however with my 2 wages combined I could still save a small amount of money each month. If I was going to get back into commercial aviation I would need to save around £3000 just so I could renew my Instrument Rating; a qualification which allows pilots to navigate by sole reference to their instruments. (In layman’s terms, an Instrument Rating is a qualification to fly through clouds). Without a current Instrument Rating I wouldn’t even be able to apply to an airline, let alone get a job.

But even in 2011, over 2 years since the beginning of the global recession, airline jobs were still hard to come by. Every week I would search various pilot forums and recruitment websites, hoping to find that major break. One day in October 2011, I found a potential opportunity on a well known pilot’s forum. Susi Air, a small airline in Indonesia, were recruiting foreign pilots on their Cessna 208B “Grand Caravan” fleet. I sent my resume and cover letter to Susi Air’s recruitment email. To my surprise, they emailed me back just a few days later, asking me to attend an interview at their training base in Java. And it appeared that they were in a hurry to recruit; the interview date was for early the following month. It was just as well I’d saved up some money; now I had just 2 weeks to renew my Instrument Rating and buy a return ticket to Jakarta!

Frankly, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this job. Asides from the time and place, Susi Air hadn’t given me much information about the interview, let alone their operation. I hadn’t even heard of Susi Air until I saw the job advertised, and at the time I knew very little about Indonesia. At first my plan was to simply go to the interview, and if I passed, stay for a year or two whilst I waited for an opportunity to fly a larger aircraft back home in Europe. But as it would turn out, this mystery interview would be the beginning of a 4 year adventure of a lifetime. I was about to explore an archipelago of 17,000 islands, each one encompassing natural beauty, history and at times, civil unrest. I would meet people from many different cultures and witness mountains which peaked higher then we could fly, thunderstorms so large that they breached the stratosphere, political and religious uprisings, and the (very occasional) volcanic eruption.