INTERVIEW
He recalls: “The first morning at
the Oast House I woke to the sound
of a Tiger Moth plane taxiing past
the window. It was the landlord,
Dave Wood, who had bought the
farm and 60 acres of land and laid it
out beautifully as grass runways for
his three Tiger Moths. I had never
had any interest in aviation up to
that point, but he told me how he
had found and restored them and
regularly flew them from his land.
“He asked me if I wanted to go
up with him. I said yes without
hesitation. The only time I had
flown before that was in a Jumbo
Jet, so it was quite an experience,
absolutely amazing.”
When Chris suggested he would
love to fly one himself, Dave threw
down the challenge: “You get your
licence and I will teach you.” He
did exactly that, acquiring the
licence and then learning to fly in a
little over a year.
Then purely by chance a huge
hot air balloon landed on the
runway outside his house one day
– and that sparked the start of
Chris’s other life in the sky, which
ultimately led to taking part in
those remarkable daredevil stunts.
But at the time such adrenalin-filled
capers were still on the distant
horizon, and as he soon discovered
it certainly wasn’t all plain sailing
through the clouds.
Initially the Aussies who landed
his balloon on the runway outside
the family home reached an
agreement with landlord Dave to
use the site to fly his eight-passenger
craft, one of the biggest available
at the time. They also had a small
sports balloon, and eventually Chris
became involved in helping to
maintain it and then learnt to fly it.
In 1992 he decided he wanted
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