Many people feel the need to lose their earthly bonds and join the birds in the sky, but relatively few people actually succeed in controlling their own flying machine. For many people, it's often scary enough just being a passenger on a commercial flight, but for those with a head for heights, conquering gravity is a most rewarding pastime.
For me, it started 20 or 30 years ago when I tried hang gliding. It was good fun, but I only flew from the nursery slopes, getting maybe 50 feet (16 m) off the ground and spending a few seconds in the air followed by several tens of minutes carrying the glider back up the hill. When my instructor died in a hang gliding accident, I didn't pursue it and flying got forgotten for a few decades.
Fast forward to 2009 and our holiday of a lifetime to New Zealand and a few other lovely locations during our world tour. The renowned Queenstown featured in our itinerary, and as it coincided with my birthday, I fancied treating myself to a bit of flying of a different kind. Rather than rewrite my previous notes, have a look here at my blog from the time.
That was fun, if a little expensive, but I was getting a taste for getting air under my feet. We moved on up the west coast of South Island, to Fox Glacier and Franz Josef Glacier, two of only three glaciers in the world that descend into rain forest. What this means is that these glaciers are very accessible to mere mortals, i.e people who aren't able to climb vertical ice faces, thousands of feet above sea level. One of many ways of getting a really close look at these beautiful glaciers is to fly up to them. So I booked a helicopter flight up onto the top of the glaciers and was really impressed with the experience (notes here). This relatively tiny machine hoisted seven of us effortlessly from sea level up to a snowy plateau, thousands of feet up, in just a few minutes. What a great job our pilot, Jason, had. I could enjoy this method of travel.
Just to check that I didn't have too great a fear of heights, I threw myself off the tallest tower in the southern hemisphere a few days later (see here) and as that seemed to go quite well, I reckoned that flying could be fun.
