Page 107 - Demo

105take-off, as we were already running into a lowering cloud base, with visibility that was not brilliant. John quickly slipped back into long line astern %u2013 sensible move, as it gave me manoeuvre room, and he could look through me and perhaps have a split second to avoid the tree that I was going to hit! It was only 18 nautical miles to the Polish border, and already I was seriously considering doing a 180 and returning to Bautzen. But it was lifting, or at least not getting worse and, just about coincident with the border, the cloud disappeared and we spat out above the flat Lower Silesian expanse of Poland. While the cloud had disappeared, the visibility was still not brilliant, and we eventually settled at about 3000 feet; this gave me the best combination of available visibility, combined with the chance of seeing the main ground features. The previously- mentioned appalling forward view from the 109 in a tail-down attitude is not much better in the cruise, with the long nose and a front windscreen that is reminiscent of a letter-box. And, oh for the lovely %u2018P%u2019 Type compass that was in the Spitfire (remember this also in the Chipmunk?), but I had to make do with an E2b (little domed standby compass), and a gyro direction indicator %u2013 which, to be fair, did not drift that much. And.....confession.....I did have a very small, first-generation GPS, which had a screen about the size of a business card, and which dropped off line with monotonous regularity. Mind you, I was amazed that it worked at all in the Faraday Cage metalwork structure of the 109 cockpit %u2013 so, very much map-and-stopwatch, with the GPS an occasional confidence booster, to reassure me I was still somewhere in the northern hemisphere. It also occurred to me that, if the engine quit, I would have to force-land the first 109 variant in Poland since.....Big black crosses on the wings? .... Pitchforks? Nah!Now, concentrate on the navigation. Poland is really pretty flat in the north, and more heavily wooded than I had expected, and navigation that day was challenging, but my first major check feature came up on time, although we were a couple of miles south of track. At my next major check, I was still south of track, just to the north of an industrial town called Lodz - 20 minutes flying time to Warsaw.About this time, I checked in with Warsaw, and they said, in not very understandable English %u2013 at least with my radios %u2013 to hold at