Decades later, in the skies around the pretty airfield at Camden, west of Sydney, I was also learning to fly a Tiger Moth.
It was not going well.
“Aww, what’d you go and do that for?!?”
The frustration in the instructor’s voice, despite the distortion in the intercom, came clearly through my headset into my ears. It felt like the words were metaphorically slapping me upside the head as they did so, and I had to admit that in that they were perfectly justified.
Jim Drinnan, sitting in the front cockpit of the Tiger Moth, was one of those crusty old flying instructors who had been around forever. He’d seen it all. I was not the first ham-fisted student he’d had muck up an approach and landing, and I wouldn’t be the last. But at that particular moment, I was the student he was dealing with. The frustration he was feeling just then was being caused entirely by me.
It was a nice approach too, side-slipping in a continuous turn as we descended, popping out nicely lined up with the grass runway. But after we crossed the boundary fence and were over the runway proper, I completely forgot to pull back on the stick to raise the nose for landing.
What happened in the next few seconds was less a landing than an arrival. The main wheels thumped violently into the ground and bounced us back into the air, the wood and the wires that held the wings together groaning in protest. I heard Jim swear and the engine surge, felt the stick jerk out of my hand as he took over and regained control and we touched down again, much gentler than my effort and more permanently this time. Now certain that the aeroplane was again safe, as we gently decelerated on the runway Jim hit the intercom switch and let my ears have it.
“I was going to send you solo, today, too.”
It was my sixth flight in a Tiger Moth and we’d just spent an hour flying wide circuits of the aerodrome and practising taking off and landing. But the last ten feet, before we touched down, was still causing me problems. Maybe I was relaxing a tiny bit too soon, maybe I was getting distracted by something. Maybe I simply kept mucking it up. But there was to be no solo flight for me that day.
In the autumn of 2010, when all this was happening, I was a licenced private pilot with about 180 flying hours in my logbook. Flying was something I did for fun. After I qualified for my licence, I quickly moved on from the little two-seater Cessna that I’d flown on my first solo to bigger four-seaters like the Piper Cherokee and Cessna 182. More recently I’d started flying aeroplanes with the little wheel at the back – “taildraggers” – called Citabrias, which, having the added bonus of being somewhat aerobatic, let me stretch my skills into flying upside down with some regularity. It was all good, clean fun.
I hired the aeroplanes from a flying school at Camden Airport, in south-western Sydney. Camden was a lovely little aerodrome, with one sealed runway that’s more than a mile long and another, shorter, runway with a surface of grass. Most of the hangars, laid out in a group to one side of the airfield itself, were of a single simple design called the Bellman. Skinned with corrugated iron, with big sliding doors at each end, a low-pitched roof and little rows of windows high on the side panels, these hangars began to be built in Australia and the UK from the mid-1930s and were designed to be easily erected using unskilled labour and to break down into transportable components. A large number survived around Australia, unsurprisingly usually located at airfields with wartime histories.
In the back of one of the Bellmans, behind the modern all-metal aeroplanes, sat a petite and pretty fabric-covered biplane, painted in military camouflage on top and bright yellow underneath, with double-decker wings and a single wooden propeller. It was a Tiger Moth, and every time I saw it I thought of the purple stamp in Jack’s logbook. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a go at one of those, I thought, to see what it was like?
Every proper flying school needed an instructor like Jim Drinnan. Career blokes, these fellows, with so many flying hours that they probably stopped counting before I was even born. Gruff and sometimes grumpy on the outside they might have been, but there was usually a gentle character that revealed itself as they got to know you. They loved to fly, but more importantly they loved to share the joy of flight with others. And what was more joyful than sailing through the air, on a cold but perfectly still and smooth autumn morning, in the open cockpit of a 1938 De Havilland DH82A Tiger Moth? So I approached Jim, and within a few weeks, wearing goggles and leather flying helmets, we taxied out for my first attempt at it.
This post is part of a series, publishing writing originally completed as part of my now-discontinued book project. Find an explanation of the series and an evolving list of contents here. (c) 2026 Adam Purcell
Something Very Big 