The art of flying crooked - Robin Liston

Reunited by a mutual friend, after 40 years of living separate lives, former school friends Robin Liston and Rory McAuliffe conceived the idea of flying in a light aeroplane from Melbourne, through the centre of Australia via Broken Hill, Coober Pedy and Alice Springs, up to Darwin then along the north coast to Broome, heading down the west coast tracking inland, before crossing the Nullarbor via Ceduna, and returning to Melbourne.They chartered a single engine 34 year old Piper Cherokee Warrior, which they named ‘Juliet’, and started to plan their journey, ignoring the fact that both of them were sixty and Rory had very limited flying experience, having only had a pilot’s licence for four years. Robin, meanwhile, knew next to nothing about navigation. In planning their journey, they decided to visit 26 widely varying places in Australia, each beginning with a different letter of the alphabet – the A-Z of Oz. During their journey, they covered 6,170 nautical miles (11,427km) in 66.6 flying hours. In the words of Robert Graves, it was ‘too late to master the art of flying straight’ so they chose to fly ‘crooked’ like butterflies.The Australian outback is home to a host of exotic creatures and unusual characters. This book offers an introduction to a few of them, including the bible-thumping preacher-cum-hotelier in Coober Pedy, the one-armed flying instructor in Geraldton, the hotelier in Kagoorlie who insisted that her guests should visit a brothel and a topless bar and the receptionist at a motel in Karratha who threatened to give one of the authors’ rooms to a hooker if they didn’t pay a 13.50 supplement.Includes eighteen pages of colour photographs.