Maximum permitted altitude

The card holds two hundred and nineteen files and I did not look at it until March, three months after the course.

I am writing the captions because the card has no captions. It has file names, timestamps and nothing else, and a file name remembers nothing.

The course runs two days on a rented field out past the services, Saturday and Sunday, nine students and one instructor. It gets you the certificate, and anybody flying without it is flying unlawfully, and flying unlawfully with two kilos of equipment is a different order of problem.

Day one is theory: airspace, the hundred and twenty metre ceiling without permission, minimum distance from people, what a restricted zone is and why you will never put anything up near an airport.

Day two is practical, and that is why there are two hundred and nineteen files.

DSC_0003, 08:14. Nine people standing round a folding table, from behind. No faces. The instructor took it, with my kit, to prove the group was complete on time.

DSC_0011, 09:02. The grass of the field from about thirty metres. Yellowed, with two tyre tracks crossing. My first flight, the sweat on my hands not visible in a photograph.

DSC_0024, 09:40. The same grass from a hundred and twenty metres. That is the legal limit, and from a hundred and twenty metres a rented field looks like a beige rectangle of no interest. I kept it because it is the ceiling and I wanted to own the ceiling.

About the part I did not know existed when I paid the fee.

Half of day two is in goggles. Immersion goggles put what the camera sees onto your face, and it is good in a way that is hard to explain, and it has an obvious problem: you go blind.

That is not a figure of speech. You are standing in a field, with a piece of equipment flying at sixty kilometres an hour two hundred metres away from you, and you cannot see the ground, the fence, or yourself.

Which is why there is a role called visual observer, and it is not a courtesy: it is a requirement.

The observer stands beside you, watching the actual aircraft with their actual eyes, and tells you what you need to know. "You're climbing." "There's a bird." "You're near the fence." And when the voice is not enough, they touch you.

On the arm to correct your heading. On the shoulder to say it is time to come down. On your back to tell you that you have walked without noticing, because a person in immersion goggles walks, and walks a long way, and does not know it.

Iraci was my observer for both afternoon sessions, because the instructor paired us up in order of registration.

DSC_0088, 14:21. A green and brown smear on the diagonal. That is the ground going past fast. This is from the moment I walked four paces without knowing and she pulled me back by my belt.

DSC_0097, 14:35. The wire fence from above, about ten metres up. Too close. Honest caption: I was going to hit it, and I did not, because somebody with a hand on my forearm said climb and I climbed before I understood why.

DSC_0112, 15:08. Sky, nothing but sky, with one band of cloud. Of no interest. It is on the card because I pressed the button by accident, and I pressed it by accident for a reason that does not fit in the caption of a photograph of sky.

After an hour in the goggles a person goes odd. It is a tiredness in the eyes and the back of the neck, and there is a disorientation that lasts a few minutes after you take them off.

When you take the goggles off, the field comes back all at once, and the first thing you see is whoever was standing next to you.

I took mine off at 15:20 and she was about fifteen centimetres away, because she had just spoken into my ear to stop me shouting a command with the radio open.

DSC_0120, 15:22. Ground. Grass very close, out of focus. The aircraft was landed and still running.

The rented field has a tool shed that the owner leaves open on course days, with two windows and no glass and a concrete floor with feed meal on it.

The group broke at half three for coffee, which is served at the folding table on the other side of the field, about a hundred and fifty metres from the shed.

A hundred and fifty metres is a long way in an open field. It is a long way in the sense that the people at the table cannot tell who is standing near the shed, because against the afternoon sun everybody is a silhouette.

The break was twenty-five minutes.

DSC_0121 to DSC_0196. Seventy-six files, all identical, all of the ground. The aircraft stayed landed and running and the button jammed under a rucksack. It is technical rubbish and I have deleted none of it.

The last session was at ten past four and I flew badly, and the instructor wrote "divided attention" on the sheet, which is the technical term and which was correct.

The practical test was at the end and I passed. The certificate came through in forty days.

DSC_0208, 17:02. The nine students and the instructor, facing front, posed. It is the official group photograph and the only one in which everybody knows they are being photographed. She is on the far left, I am on the far right, and somebody decided that.

DSC_0214, 17:31. The empty field from a hundred and twenty metres, with the cars leaving down the dirt track. Last flight of the day, cleared by the instructor, battery at thirty-one per cent.

I never saw Iraci again. She lives in another town, did the course here because the place came up here, and we exchanged nothing beyond what you exchange in a group chat that died in a fortnight.

It was two afternoon sessions. That is what happened, and inflating it would be a lie.

What made me open the card in March was buying a new battery and needing to format it.

DSC_0219. Last file. The inside of the tool shed, shot upwards, showing a roof beam and part of a window with no glass. Timestamp on the file: 23:47. The course finished at five.