We all make jokes about the Met boys, but most of ther mistakes are matters of degree. A low gets deeper than expected, a front moves faster. But you can count on both low and front existing. And a pilot lives with the weather like living with a family. He watches the patterns of mood and illnes come and go and, if he stays awake, he knows where he is in the pattern and doesn't get any nasty surprises. If the North Atlantic has measles this week then Europe will haveit in a couple of days; maybe more so, maybe less, but it'll be there. God doesn't wake up in the morning and say: 'Now what shall I give 'em today?' Except with hurricanes, maybe.

Bar a few gaps, I've lived with the weather myself for the past twenty years. I knew what Ken meant when he said not knowing made you feel cut off.

We got aboard at about half past three and the inside smelt like a hot oil well, so I left the door hanging down – the insideof it forms the steps – as long as possible. The interior of a Queen Air is about the height and width of a Volkswagen Microbusbut there's no standard layout. Castle Hotels had chosen to have five largish passenger seats and had scrapped the lavatory in favour of extra luggage space just aft of the door. Now part of that space was filled with the two frontmost seats which had been pulled off their rails to make room for the champagne boxes stacked either side of the narrow aisle, behind the cockpit. It looked a bit clumsy, but it put them right over the centre of gravity. Anyway, I hadn't expected to be flying passengers until I'd got the seats back in place.

Ken was already in the right-hand pilot's seat when I squeezed through and started unpacking the checklists and Aerad guide from my briefcase.

'God, but you keep a shitty aeroplane when I'm not around,' he said. Well, I suppose the floor was just slightly smothered with pipe ash, used matches and crumpled pages off my navigation pad. I'd been meaning to do something…

I said: 'I got involved. Have you remembered which way is up, yet?'

He smiled, jerked his head back towards the stacked boxes and asked softly: 'How did you resist opening that lot?'

'If it's what we think it is, we've got no alibi at all once they're opened.'

'I suppose not.' He picked up the checklists and sorted them. Both side windows were open and a bit of breeze was limping rough, but it wasn't any snowstorm outside. Already my shirtwas sticking to my back, and it would be nasty and clammy then we cooled off at 5,000 feet. The hell with it. Let's get started. I went aft, whistled up a ground crewman with the statutory fire extinguisher, shut the door, made sure the girls were strapped in, then went forward and sat down.

'Let's go.'

Ken started to read the checklist. 'Brakeson… beacon light on… circuit breakers in… master switch…'

I turned the ignition key and the aeroplane began to wake with a gentle hum. Needles stirred sluggishly on the dials. A thin whine as the boost pumps came on, and now we were working. I set up the engine control, Ken watching my hand, memorising the moves.

'Throttle about half an inch,' I explained. 'Mag switch "prime", you can see the fuel pressure drop, then pick up you're ready.' I pointed to the port engine and the crewman outside nodded and aimed his extinguisher vaguely in that. direction. I wondered if he'd remember to set it off if the engine actually did explode.

'Mag switch tostart…' The propeller grunted around and I rammed up the mixture lever and it spun and howled. I set the run-up for 1400 revs, turned on the alternator, and did it all again with the second engine.

The crewman wandered dreamily away. Of course, he might really be suffering from disappointment.

We sat and watched the oil temperatures creep up; the engines are touchy about that. The radio came in on somebody from the aero club asking for takeoff. We watched thelittle aeroplane, half a mile away, run along and bounce intothe air, wings rocking nervously. It wouldn't hurt to stay on ground an extra few knots, with upcurrents like that coming off the hot tarmac…

Then I glanced at Ken and knew he was filing away just the same idea, along with his guess at the horizontal visibility, his own estimate of the wind, and whatever was happening around the airfield: that Piper Colt in the circuit, an Olympic 727 taxiing in that would bring a fleet of vehicles rushing out at any minute, a Trident loading but unlikely to move until we were gone.

I got taxi clearance and pressure setting and trundled slowly down past the aero club and the RAF hangars and around to the run-up point for runway 32. The club Riper was weaving and twitching low on the approach. I ran up both engines, tested the magnetos and feathering. The Piper floated past our nose, bounced and settled down. You could almost hear the pilot's sigh of relief.

The tower said: 'Whiskey Zulu, line up and hold.'

I drove on to the runway behind the Piper. It scurried along and turned off. The tower said: 'Whiskey Zulu, clear to go.'

I looked over at Ken. He was sitting with his hands in his lap, facequite expressionless. I slumped and let go of the controls.

'Okay. Take her to Wyoming.'

He looked and grinned slowly and sat up. His hands trembled a bit as he settled them on the controls, then pushed the throttles smoothly forwards and we were both home again.

We levelled out at 5,000 feet – I'd elected to fly beneath the airways so that I didn't need to keep applying for changes ofcourse whenever I wanted to dodge a bit of the cumulus cloud Iexpected ahead – and Ken steadied her on 155 knots indicated,then trimmed her to fly hands-off.

'She feels like a real aeroplane,' he said grudgingly. He didn't like the controls of most private aircraft and particularly not American ones. 'Bloody heavy on ailerons, though.'

I was sorting through the Aeradguide for the Beirut approach charts. "They've got servo tabs working in the oppositedirection.'

He stared. 'You mean they deliberately make her feel like a DC-3? Why?'

'Ask Beech; I only work here.'

He made a growly noise and went back to frowning at the instruments. I found the Beirut pages and set 351 kilocycles on thesecond Automatic Direction Finder compass, although wouldn't pick up any signals just yet. The first ADF was already tuned to the Dhekelia beacon on Cyprus's south coast, a moment later we went slap over the middle of it. You could tell by the way the needle shivered, uncertain which waytoturn, before spinning round to face backwards… 'Neat. He'd worked out our exact amount of drift and compensated for it in about two minutes, not having touched anaeroplane in two years and this one never before. The coastline, and its fringe of vivid pale green water crawled away behind; I switched from Nicosia approach to the Flight Information Region and said hello, and that was about as much as I needed do for the next hundred miles.

Ken seemed happy enough without any chatter, so I unstrapped and went back to the girls. 'All okay?'

Mitzi nodded, Eleanor grinned – a quick expression that showed a lot of white teeth. 'Fine, fine. Is that our in-flight refreshment?' And she nodded at the boxes stacked a few inches ahead of her knees.

'Sorry, no.' The Queen Air isn't pressurised (which was why I was going around rather than over the weather) but we could talk by using stage voices. 'I'm just carting it around for a bloke until he decides what to do with it.'

Mitzi asked: 'The plane is for the hotel, then? ' She'd seen the Castle insignia on the tail.

'The hotel group, yes. But they don't mind.'

Eleanor said: 'Something I wondered about: we've neither of us got visas for Lebanon. Does it matter?'

'Not a bit. You can buy 'em before you reach the immigration desk. Costs a few dollars, that's all.' But that reminded me -of something. I looked at my watch. 'We'll be starting our approach on Beirut in about half an hour. Anything you want, just stick your head through and shout. Not that we've got anything.'