Wayne Martin His love of flying still burns

Miles Hursthouse is a sprightly 93 years old and one of the region’s best-known glider pilots. He spoke to about his passionate involvement in flying that has spanned more than half a century.

Miles Hursthouse can talk flying until your ears bleed. At 93 years old, there’s not much that the vastly experienced and widely respected Nelson glider pilot doesn’t know about thermals, ridge lifts and lee waves. He’s a pioneer of the sport in the Nelson region, having co-founded the Nelson Gliding Club with now 86-year-old Arthur Jordan in 1960.

But there’s an intriguing twist to this nonagenarian’s story – he’s still flying.

That’s right. In spite of being within sight of his 100th birthday, he’s still a cloud whisperer and jumps at every opportunity to launch one of the newly named Nelson Lakes Gliding Club’s fleet of five gliders from their Lake Station airfield, about 9km west of St Arnaud.

You wouldn’t bet against him hitting his ton either. His father and an aunt both reached 103 and his brother, Dan, is still going strong at 96. So his genetic disposition suggests there are still several good years of flying ahead of him.

There have certainly been some concessions to his increasing years. He undergoes medical checks every three months to determine his fitness, so far without a hitch. Club rules also now prevent him from taking up paying passengers, simply because if anything did go wrong, reports of a 90-plus pilot at the controls wouldn’t be the best look.

‘‘We have regular instructor panel meetings and we’ve got about 10 instructors in the club. I’m not necessarily the best, but I’m certainly the oldest and most experienced,’’ he says.

‘‘It was decided, and I actually made the motion, that pilots 75 or over aren’t allowed to take paying passengers. That happened just a few months ago.

‘‘But I am still allowed to take as many family members or personal friends that I like. The only thing I’m not allowed to do is instruct brand new pilots or paying passengers.’’

If anything, he says piloting gliders has become more straightforward over the years. Besides his 52 years of flying experience, the equipment has improved significantly.

‘‘I’ve found myself getting much more automatic in my ability to fly and to also be able to cope with turbulent and bad conditions.

‘‘The aircraft are much easier to fly and they’ve got better instruments. You fly automatically, the way you drive a car. I never think about what I’m doing at the controls, I’m just part of the machine. It’s as simple as that really.’’

His passion for flying developed at an early age. He was born in Hastings in 1919, and aircraft were clearly a novelty back then. A visit from famous aviator Charles Kingsford-Smith helped to stoke the embers.

‘‘I’ve always been nutty about flying, ever since I was at primary school in Hastings and they got their first aeroplane in the area and I can remember how excited we all were seeing it come over the town. From then on I’ve got more and more keen and Kingsford-Smith arrived and got us keener.’’

Flying gliders is just one part of a remarkable life that’s seen Hursthouse survive the Hawke’s Bay earthquake as a boy, study law at Auckland University and join the New Zealand Territorials before eventually commanding artillery batteries near Dunedin during World War II. A stint in the Pacific saw him inducted into the Fiji army before, at war’s end, turning his attention to medicine and becoming a house surgeon at Wellington Hospital.

By now married to Jillian, they headed to Nelson’s more favourable living and working environment in 1952 where Hursthouse served as a GP for about 30 years. And after further training, he set up a dermatology and radiotherapy service.

It was during his time in Wellington that he accompanied a sick patient on a return flight to Dunedin and on the flight home he was unexpectedly handed the controls by the pilot, giving him his first real taste of controlled flight.

‘‘I absolutely loved it, I felt I was part of it,’’ he recalls. ‘‘I really felt like I wasn’t sitting in something that was flying, I felt like I was it and it really bugged me into it straight away.’’

It would be another decade or so before his attention turned to gliders, an invitation to the Blenheim Gliding Club to visit Nelson with their tow plane and sell flights sowing the seeds for the Nelson club’s formation.

Hursthouse was 41 when he made his first flight in February, 1960 – a 19minute flight to 1500 feet. His first solo flight would come just four months and 14 flights later, a moment he still recalls with remarkable clarity. ‘‘I felt great. Once I got off the aerotow and got control, I absolutely loved it. It was a beautiful fine day with a little sea breeze. I did a slow circuit 300 feet to the left then did a good landing. So after a total of 21⁄ hours flying, I went solo.’’

It’s never been a competitive issue with Hursthouse. Despite Nelson’s nearness to world-class gliding location Omarama, near the southern end of the Mackenzie Basin, his involvement in gliding remains purely aesthetic.

‘‘I wasn’t interested in competing. Looking back on it, I realised that there are some people who just like flying. They don’t care whether they go anywhere, they just love flying and I’m one of those.

‘‘Also, there are some who’d far sooner do some travelling around the hills or the lakes. I’m a bit that way, but only if I’m getting bored with just being in the one spot.’’

He qualified as an instructor later that year, followed by the exciting next phase of his flying career in 1961 when his interest turned to aerobatics.

He achieved his longest ever flight in 1962 when, as a guest of the local club, his regular annual return visits to Hawke’s Bay inspired him to launch near Te Mata Peak in Havelock North.

‘‘I launched and went over to the cliffs where there was lift from the sea breeze and I went backwards and forwards along those bluffs for five hours and 17 minutes.’’

Although ‘‘terribly bored’’ he says he became increasingly aware of growing interest in his flight.

‘‘You couldn’t eat, you couldn’t have a pee or anything. On this occasion they put it over the radio that there was an attempt at a record being made by a visiting pilot under Te Mata Peak. All the people drove up in their cars and came out and sat on the cliffs and watched me, waved at me every time I passed them.

‘‘You just had to fly very carefully the whole time because you’re very close to the cliff. You’re not above it, you’re just near the top.’’

He’s mastered many useful tricks over the years and a manoeuvre he learned from top-dressing pilots known as the stall turn has proved one of the most important.

‘‘You bring your aircraft up until it’s about to stall due to lack of speed and then kick the rudder and she flicks round in that direction in a stall turn. It’s a very useful thing to learn.

‘‘Sometimes you’d get caught up in a situation with a hill on either side in a valley and you couldn’t get round in an ordinary turn and the only way you could get out of it to reverse was to do a stall turn.

‘‘It takes a bit of judgment, but you’ve just got to bring it up to that level where it doesn’t drop its nose or spin . . . you just feel that it’s ready and you kick one rudder and she flicks round and you’re away.’’

By its very nature and with successful flights dependent on favourable wind and weather conditions, occasionally there are situations where a lack of lift can force a pilot to make an unscheduled landing. Hursthouse prefers to think of them as controlled unscheduled landings – not emergency landings.

He says that part of any pilot’s preparation involves identifying suitable bailout options, like the one forced on him in 1963 when he had to land his glider in a paddock during a crosscountry flight that ended 8km short of Omaka airfield in Marlborough.

On another occasion he ‘‘ran out of lift’’ while negotiating the Barnicoat Range and was forced to land on the rugby fields at Waimea College. But they are the exception and certainly no deterrent to climbing back into the cockpit at every opportunity.

Memories such as circling over the western ranges, hearing the West Coast surf and looking back at Nelson in the distance, or negotiating the mountains on return flights to Springs Junction, constantly rekindle his passion.

‘‘As far as I’m concerned, I just love flying. I don’t care where I go or how I come down, I just love flying. And if I can, I do.’’