This is my response to a letter from my old boyfriend Doug's current girlfriend. Asking me to write about him and our time together years ago.
Halfway, WA
Hi Laura,
I don't write stories for other people. My father taught me that. He built, rebuilt, and did civil conversions on airplanes as a vocation, and an obsession. In point of fact, my screen name comes from the very first airplane that I ever owned. Back when I was three-years-old he titled an Avro Anson that he acquired at a disposals auction In my name.
He always had a plan, and everything that he did always fit together just right. Once things were up and running and the system worked right if a potential buyer preferred a change dad would usually alter it to specification. But the alteration was done on a system that functioned perfectly beforehand. It just worked out a lot better than trying to put a whole bunch of pieces that weren't necessarily fully compatible together.
But, Laura, I'm writing this because I'm afraid that I might be the "Sheila," you refer to. See here's the situation: David, that's your David isn't it? Ole Dave was taking one of our "Heritage Flights." I loved working that end of the business. It was really fun, we used historic airplanes that were a significant part of our history. Back then it was a sweet Vickers Viastra. We did everything wearing period dress, using antique cars and operating flights from old airports and terminal buildings that we'd had restored to past glory.
The whole operation was based out of Forrest out on the Nullabor Plain. A spot in the desert that wasn't really so much of a place as it was a dot on a map. There's an old "Airways" hotel with an attached dining hall, next door to a big hangar and fuel depot alongside a railway siding. A few restored fettlers cabins now rented to guests sit opposite the siding. Before we took it over it was just a fueling stop for general aviation traffic and it still is albeit with better accommodations.
But West Australian Airways built the field back in the day when the planes flying between Perth in Adelaide flew only in daylight and couldn't make the whole 1450 mile -- and it was statute miles back then -- distance in a day. They stopped for the night and were tweaked and refueled. Flying was for the well-heeled, a hotel was built there so that passengers could have a nice dinner, play badminton, have a shower, and sleep in a nice room. Then continue on their journey in the morning when it was light.
It was fate that brought us together. Well, if you can call a series of dumb errors fate. David was a go-getter. He wasn't truly interested in the whole "reenactment sort of thing." But for an afternoon he found it rather fascinating. I myself was traveling in style wearing a period dress. The twin engine Vickers was a lovely 1920's era biplane. Airways' first all-metal airplane in fact. I was to take over management of my employer's operation of the hotel for the next six months.
It was a pretty nice posting for somebody in my position as I knew all of the pilots who flew the route, the cabin attendants and some of the many "frequent flyers" who came out to the desert for a weekend "away from it all." David's employer at the time had apparently booked the flight through some ignorant ass of a travel agent. Someone who neither knew of our operation nor read the fine print. Because they bought him a ticket via Forrest departing Adelaide on Tuesday morning and arriving Perth on Friday afternoon.
