Principal's Message T2 W9 2022

Touchdown

Have you ever been on a plane? I have, heaps of times. When I was young I was in the Air Cadets, primarily because I just loved aircraft. They used to load us all up on The Western Mail train and send us overnight from Dubbo to Sydney. It was a bit over four hours drive in a car, about 12 hours on The Western Mail. It was very ‘Harry Potter’ actually, a bunch of kids on a train with no adults looking after us, fine times for young lads.

When we got to Sydney we would be shuffled off to RAAF Richmond and do all sorts of interesting things. We would shoot rifles at the gun range, march in the parade grounds, live in the barracks but the absolute highlight was going up in the C-130 Hercules transport planes. I had similar experiences at RAAF Fairbairn in Canberra where I spent one hour and forty minutes in an Iriquois helicopter as well. Magic memories.

I still love flying, while I do get bored on long hauls, the views on a clear day are just magnificent. My work takes me from time to time to places like Sydney or Melbourne, when I lived in Perth I used to fly a lot to Adelaide, the HQ of Lutheran Schools in that part of Australia. I am very familiar with the safety aspects of many of our domestic aircraft and where to find my lifejacket.

I find take-off and landing really exciting too. Particularly landing. In fact I equate landing a lot to what life is like sometimes when you have a big event on the horizon. Christmas with relatives coming maybe, a wedding, moving house, a birthday with a zero in it, an operation or maybe, in my case at the moment, long service leave.

When you are flying you know the landing is coming. The plane is poking along, you are enjoying the view and somewhere in the distant future the event is imminent. Then, before the pilot says anything you notice something change, the hum of the engines changes just a little bit and you feel the plane gradually beginning to descend. No worries, you know the event is now getting closer. After a while the pilot says, ‘Cabin crew, please prepare the cabin for landing.’ Now it gets exciting. It is happening, people start positioning things, you start to pack away your stuff, and you feel the plane in a very obvious descent towards the destination.

Then, particularly on really big planes, something weird happens. The captain starts to slow the plane down. As you are lowered over the city of your destination everything slows right down. I mean I know he’s got to slow it down but he doesn’t have to make it stop in mid-air. The plane gets slower and slower and you think you are never going to get there, the pilot does a massive wide circle, a huge banking curve and goes even slower. You can see the destination, the runway lines up, he goes even slower, you’re sure he has made a mistake, something this big can’t fly this slow, I was in the air cadets mate, I know about thrust and lift, speed it up a bit!

It feels like the aircraft is hanging still in mid-air. And then it happens. The closer you get to the ground the faster you realise you are going. You feel the wheels go down, you see the ground getting closer and you think, ‘Uh oh, this bloke has brought this in too hot!’ You see that shadow of the aircraft on the ground and as it whips over a runway marker or something and you get a sense that you are still travelling in excess of 280 kilometers an hour, everything speeds up to a ridiculous pace and the feeling of just how fast you are going becomes really obvious. The relatives are coming, there’s only two days to go and I haven’t bought the presents yet, my calendar is full at work, I haven’t mowed the lawn, I wanted to get that washing done, the kids have sport and I have to pick up the flowers and get my hair cut, I just don’t know how I can get it all done, more and more stuff is getting jammed into less and less time, I haven’t finished filing that stuff yet and what about the ….

Touchdown.

Welcome to your destination. I pray that God continues to be close to each of you over the holiday break and throughout next term.

I’ll see you sometime in August.

Shane Altmann
Principal