First Flight by Liam O'Flaherty
The Black Aeroplane by Frederick Forsyth
Two tales about showing courage to learn, and following your own instinct.
“Storm clouds. They were huge. They looked like black mountains standing in front of me across the sky.”
Part I: First Flight
Answer the following questions:
1) Why was the young seagull afraid to fly? Do you think all young birds are afraid to make their first flight, or are some birds more timid than others? Do you think a human baby also finds it a challenge to take its first steps?
The young seagull was afraid to fly because he thought that his wings would not support him. He thought so, even though his wings were bigger than his brothers and sister who had already taken their first flight. The young seagull was also scared of the vast sea beneath and the depth from cliff to the surface. He thought it was miles down.
Not all the young birds are afraid to make their first flight. Only some like our young seagull are timid. We have the examples of his siblings here. Their wings were smaller and yet they had already taken their first flight.
It is certainly a challenge for the human babies to take their first steps. However, they are not as much scared as the young seagull here. The babies are excited to do something new and something that everyone around them is doing. In this excitement, fear would subside.
2) “The sight of the food maddened him.” What does this suggest? What compelled the young seagull to finally fly?
The young seagull had gone without food for more than 24 hours. It had been a very hot day too. The sun was blazing and he felt the intense heat. He was starving for hours, and when he saw his family catching fish and eating, he got maddened by this sight. This suggests that the young seagull was desperate for food, and would do anything to get some.
This hunger, his desperation for food, finally compelled the young seagull to fly. The mother devised a trick. She flew very close to the young seagull with fish in her beak. Seeing this, the young seagull also started walking towards the edge of the cliff. However, mother stopped just a few feet away and floated there. She did not move ahead. Already maddened by hunger, the young seagull could not understand this, and made a jump to catch the fish from his mother’s beak. This made him fall from the cliff and he was left with no other option but to flutter his wings and fly.
3) “They were beckoning to him, calling shrilly.” Why did the seagull’s father and mother threaten him and cajole him to fly?
cajole – trick someone into doing something
What the parents seagulls did was a perfect example of tough parenting. Parents always want the betterment of their children and want them to improve. To achieve this, they might take tough steps sometimes. Here in this case, the parents knew that it was time for the young seagull to start flying. If he did not, then he would develop flying skill late and that would affect all later developments in his life. Without the flying skill, he would have to depend constantly on others for food. To teach him to be self-sufficient and self-dependent, and make his life better for the future, the parents first threatened him and then tricked him into flying.
The threat was that if he did not fly, they would not give him food and he would starve. They would not even talk to him. Later, his mother tempted the young seagull with a fish in her beak, and compelled him to jump trying to catch that fish.
Part II: Two Stories about Flying
Answer the following questions:
1) “I’ll take the risk.” What is the risk? Why does the narrator take it?
The risk is that he decides to fly through the storm cloud. He wants to take that risk because he is desperate to get home and meet his family. He badly misses home, especially the English breakfast which he really wants to have the following morning.
2) Describe the narrator’s experience as he flew the aeroplane into the storm.
Inside the clouds, everything was suddenly black. It was impossible to see anything outside the aeroplane. The old aeroplane jumped and twisted in the air. The compass was turning round and round and round. It was dead. The other instruments were suddenly dead, too. Even the radio had stopped functioning.
3) Why does the narrator say, “I landed and was not sorry to walk away from the old Dakota…”?
The narrator had come out of the storm cloud after a lot of efforts and time. He was relieved to have landed on some ground. His fuel was almost over, and all his instruments had also failed. Therefore, when he finally landed at an airport, he said that he was not sorry to walk away from his plane, the old Dakota.
4) What made the woman in the control centre look at the narrator strangely?
The woman looked at the narrator strangely as there was no other aeroplane flying that night. On her radar also, there was only the narrator’s plane, and the narrator was asking who the other pilot was. This surprised the woman.
5) Who do you think helped the narrator to reach safely? Discuss this among yourselves and give reasons for your answer.
It seems that the other aeroplane and the other pilot were the figment of narrator’s imagination. It is more likely that the narrator was having hallucinations of himself.
The first hint is that there are usually no aeroplanes which are painted completely black. Further, this aeroplane had no lights on it as well.
The narrator was desperate to get home, meet his family members and have a nice English breakfast. Then he got trapped into this storm. This made him tense and anxious. His fuel was running out. All his instruments stopped functioning. He was not finding any way to get out of there. Probably, because of all this, his mind conjured up his own image to save himself. He was a skilled pilot and this image of the other pilot worked as an intuition (a gut feeling) for him and got him out.
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