I’ve always had a thing about flying. Not scared or anything…just fascinated by it. Like many young guys I wanted to become a pilot and, also like many young guys, it just didn’t happen. Unfortunately the fascination never left, but dimmed, perhaps, as I started working and tried to concentrate on other things….like the real world for instance!

It so happened that, after a few years toiling in the UK, I was offered a position in Bahrain which I took up in 1989. By chance, once settled there, I started socialising with a few of the Gulf Air flight deck crew members who were based in the Gulf state. Of course, supping ‘beverages’ with these guys, who got paid to fly Tristars and 767s around the World, just brought the old hankering back to the surface. And to make matters worse, even though I had a bit of spare cash by that time, there was no local flying school to go and have a try on my own!

Fast forward four years. In 1993 I transferred to Dubai, where I still live. And guess what… Dubai International Airport (DIA) a place where I’ve worked for the last four years, boasts its own little flying club. Needless to say, I enrolled on a Private Pilot License course ASAP and obtained the PPL flying qualification in 1998. Flying at DIA is a great experience – it’s unrestricted, in the sense that you are using the same airport facilities as the big jets and at the same time. Unfortunately, private flying is expensive and I stopped ‘going up’ in about 2000. I still have the license (of course it needs a bit of work to regain the currency) and who knows…I may ‘get up’ there again one day.