'This Way Up: The Tale of a Timid Nobody Who Became a Gyroplane Pilot' by Shirley Jennings

Updated: Nov 4

Buy This Way Up: The Tale of a Timid Nobody Who Became a Gyroplane Pilot by Shirley Jennings:

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This is the story of a shy and unremarkable nobody who learned to be a gyroplane pilot and consequently discovered a wider world.

Bored with the daily routine in the 1980s, a spur-of-the-moment decision to fly a light aircraft changed the entire course of my life. I had no intention of becoming a pilot—people like me don’t do things like that—but flying soon grew mundane, and the initial thrill wore thin. In an effort to recapture that lost spark of wonder, I tried a small helicopter and became captivated by the rotary-winged bug. My fate was sealed when, just a couple of months later, I saw Wing Commander Ken Wallis (the real James Bond) flying his famous gyroplane, Little Nellie. The addiction was incurable, and I was quite beyond help.

However, gyroplanes have a bad reputation, and people tried hard to dissuade me. With so few gyronauts scattered across the UK in the pre-Internet 1990s, it felt like trying to join a secret society. The only available machines were single-seat, and the only way to learn to fly was to own one. No one said this was going to be easy! My quest led me to Cornwall, where a small group of autorotational veterans took me under their collective wing. Thanks to them, Delta-J was born, and they taught me how to stay alive, working from the ground up.

Twenty years later, my rotary-winged obsession took this hesitant mouse across the English Channel, where I discovered the unimaginable freedom of the French ultralight world. My tiny rotorcraft and I are now part of that world. It has been a voyage of discovery and new horizons, with ups and downs in every sense—a journey I could never have imagined when I took that first aeroplane flight in 1985. Gyroplanes have been my greatest adventure!

About the author

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As a shy introvert who’s wired up a little different, the written word with a quirky twist of humour has always come naturally to Shirley Jennings. An unassuming misfit with an over-developed sense of the ridiculous, her greatest passion in life is flying in a plastic bucket hanging off a rotor blade (and when she can’t do that, the next best thing is to write about it!).