Page 314 - Demo

310never enjoyed flying quite so much after the accident. While I still put myself forward to fly as much as possible, I was not so disappointed if my sorties got cancelled.As the summer progressed, we appeared to have more refresher students to fly and even some presumably Air Training Corps cadets to have air experience flights. Then August we had flight visit to Cognac where the French Epselons were based. I do not think that they were quite as powerful as the Tucano nor did they have an ejector seat. We were able to get to Cognac in one 2-hour 40 minute flight. I took the Commandant for a famil sortie in the Tucano and then we flew a mixed formation flight with them. I think that they wanted to basically have a 2 v 2 rumble. We said that we were not authorised to do that and so just flew about the countryside and over the sea with them. We all went out to dinner to a restaurant somewhere one evening. They were driving but there was a lot of drinking going on. We were a bit surprised that everyone was drinking and made some reference to the drink drive laws, which are stricter than ours. They said they were a problem but clearly took no notice of them. We wanted to buy some cognac while we were there, but it wasn%u2019t until the day we were leaving that this was organised. We drove out to a distillery and had a tour of it although we were pressed for time. At one point the proprietor got me to sniff at the hole in an empty barrel. I politely did so and to my surprise he blew in the other end. I was immediately drunk with a lung full of cognac fumes. Luckily the effect did not last long. We eventually got to his shop which was stacked with bottles, and he sold us all a couple of bottles. At a very good price. He explained this was the angels share. As the cognac matures some of it evaporates away and that is called the angel%u2019s share. What it meant in practise is that these bottles were not declared to customs. We raced back to our aircraft, put the bottles on the floor under our ejector seats and flew home.