The pilot of the Black Hawk told me I could recline the seat if I wasn’t comfortable. ‘Oh, great!’ I said, and started fiddling with the rock-hard thing I was strapped into, looking for a recliner handle. ‘Not really,’ he laughed, and his square jaw barely moved. When I say square jaw, I mean he had the squarest jaw of any man I had ever seen. He looked like a cartoon character. I had not realised men could really look like that. I felt a fool. Of course the seat didn’t recline.
I was strapped into a Black Hawk because I was on a press trip with Gordon Brown to Iraq and we were being flown into the Green Zone. All the reporters on the trip had been meant to be flown by the British Army in Lynx helicopters but at the last minute we were told they had run low on Lynxes and some of us would be taken by the Americans in Black Hawks.
It was the most exciting flying experience of my life, and I’m a nervous flier, so I find any flight exciting.
The guy in the pilot’s seat was very much enjoying having a female journalist on board and after a few more jokes about the in-flight service and so on, he took off at a sharp angle and instantly veered the chopper up and backwards into what felt like a loop-the-loop.
I screamed and screamed and the more I screamed the more he laughed and the harder he flew, and I just stared at his big square jaw, staking my life on it.
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