Aerobatics and flight instructor Nick Caudwell clambers up into the cockpit of a vintage American F4U Corsair Naval fighter plane like a teenager. In fact, Nick is retired, having spent most of his life flying commercial aircraft for airlines like Ansett and Cathay Pacific. Retirement freed him to build a Sopwith Snipe biplane – from scratch – using the original blueprints. Nick continues his love of flying vintage planes at the Peninsula Aero Club in Tyabb, where he instructs pilots in all aspects of flying, including aerobatics.
The Corsair was designed for aircraft carriers, hence the foldup wings. Another vintage aeroplane at Tyabb, the Winjeel CA-25, an advanced pilot training aircraft, was designed in Australia and made at Fishermen’s Bend, Nick’s interest in planes and flying began in the 1950s when his dad took him to an airshow at Abbingdon Airbase in the UK.
“For two pounds, we got a ride in a Dragon Rapide. I grew up on a farm, and we flew right over it. Our farm was right in the path of the runway and these things would come right over the roof of the house. As kids, we thought that was amazing until one day, one of them crashed right in the middle of our village.”
One of my mentors when I first learned to fly was a lady pilot, Jackie Moggridge, the first woman to parachute in South Africa
Nick didn’t know immediately that he would be a pilot. Much later, in Devon, while he was working at the Axminster carpet factory, he learned to fly for the fun of it. “I got sucked in straight away. I thought ‘This is more fun than designing carpets.’ Somebody said, ‘I suppose you’ll do this professionally now.’ It never occurred to me that I could do it. One of my mentors when I first learned to fly was a lady pilot, Jackie Moggridge, the first woman to parachute in South Africa. She came to the UK and was involved in the Women’s Air Auxiliary during the war, ferrying aeroplanes.
Nick came to Australia and did the commercial training at Moorabbin, and then did the instructor training.
He was a pilot in New Guinea, flying in things like mackerel and rice, then flying coffee out. Nick flew DC3s with Air New Guinea. “Ansett was hiring, so I got offered a job with them and flew all around Australia for about fifteen years. Then, I joined Cathay Pacific out of Hong Kong as a 747 Captain. Now I’m back full circle and flying light aircraft. All that time, however, I was interested in old aeroplanes. “I bought a Nanchang CJ6A, which is a Chinese trainer with a radial engine and is enormous fun. It was the first Chinese aeroplane and is beautifully built. There’s a couple of them still operating out of Moorabbin doing joy flights.”
“I learned aerobatics in the ’60s in the UK on Chipmunks. When I was with Ansett I used to come down here and hire the Tiger Moth and do some fun flying. I absolutely love it. It’s proper flying – open cockpit, seat of the pants type flying. It’s completely different to press-button flying following a pink line on a screen. I absolutely love it. I still do plenty of Tiger flying.
“We’ve got a little formation team here, and we call ourselves ‘The Frozen Five’ because we’re always freezing cold whenever we go anywhere. You couldn’t get a more diverse bunch of people, but we’ve all got the same passion. We’ve got a plumber who’s twenty-four, a truck driver, another retired airline guy, me, and the ex-deputy leader of the Liberal Party.
Nick also teaches formation flying, which is harder than it looks. “People find it hard to start with. When flying without an aeroplane alongside, you don’t realise just how much the aeroplanes actually move. If you just touch it (the control), you move upwards or downwards. They learn to compensate for that. It’s a much finer, more subtle way of flying.”
What’s it like to fly a plane of which there are very few left in the world? “I feel enormously privileged that I get to do it, and I have to keep pinching myself so that people keep asking me to do it. How lucky am I? I certainly couldn’t afford to own it myself.”
Nick’s introduction to aerobatics at nineteen was very different from the kind of training he gives pilots today. “These days, you spend ages going through each manoeuvre to make sure they’re really competent, but I was taught by a chap who was a Word War Two pilot. There was no great big long endorsement; he just went up and showed me all his manoeuvres, and then I had a go! One of them I completely stuffed up and he just let me stuff it up.” Nick laughs, “It was no problem for him after what he’s endured during the war. It was a vertical manoeuvre, and I didn’t kick it early enough. We fell backwards and – whack! I didn’t do that again.” During aerobatics, despite his rocky start, Nick has never felt close to crashing.
So, what will happen to our vintage planes when all the parts wear out? Nick says several things might happen. “Generally, the aerialists who are operating these planes are getting older, the planes are getting older, the parts are getting harder to get, the skills of fixing and overhauling the engines are getting thinner on the ground. If you’ve got a Tiger Moth engine, the best person to take it to is Borg Sorenson – Borg is ninety-six! And he still flies his Tiger Moth. He still swings the propeller himself! He’s incredible.
“In the UK, there’s quite an industry around making parts for the Spitfire. Up at Wangaratta, we’ve got a company that specialises in the P-40 (the Kittyhawk), so there are people doing it. There are younger people coming through as well.” Nick says it takes money, passion, time, and effort to keep the vintage planes flying. He hopes to continue flying them for as long as he can. “There’s nothing like these old planes as far as I’m concerned. I just love them.”