My last day in New Zealand was a day to remember. I flew. I mean, I took a trial flight in a small Cesena. As New Zealand has quite a few aero clubs and we could try the introductory flight at a very reasonable price, Grant took me to the one of the airports nearby with his family.

This time I tried a double seat Cesena which has a pair of control sticks and pedals. I took one side and the instructor took the other side. As soon as I'd finished checking in, we entered on the cockpit and the instructor gave me a simple lecture about pedals and other controls. And turned on the engine. "Well, can you go to the runway? I told you how to use the pedals." How easygoing he is! Japanese driving instructors would be stricter.

Anyway, I managed to drag the aircraft to the runway and the instructor made the engine at the full throttle. After some seconds of running, he just told me "O.K. Could you pull the lever please?” and so I did. I felt a sort of sensation of losing gravity and off we went. I might be addicted with this feeling.

The aircraft passed the sky of Auckland city and arrived over the ocean. Now we could start playing without the risk of falling into the residential area. Actually controlling the aircrafts is totally different from cars as we are require three dimensions of space recognition. Coincidentally, I knew the words of "yaw", "pitch" and other special words thanks to 3D graphic software. I'd never imagined making use of these words in real life. At the very first, I was quite nervous but flew well after I relaxed.

After getting used to the flying, I asked the instructor to switch the control to him as I wanted to shoot some photos from sky. He agreed but went too far and started an acrobatic flight. Oh man, it's too much service. I just wanted to get some nice photos. Due to the unusual gravity, a little motion sickness attacked me and if we'd flown longer it would've been quite disastrous.

As landing is too difficult for a beginner, it was the time for the instructor. Somewhat surprisingly he landed on the grass not using the runway but his landing was very professional. I felt little impact and the plane landed very smoothly. He showed me the aircraft after this and the analogue meters and structures were surprisingly simple though considering the year of manufacture it was obvious. I suppose the recent hybrid cars would have more complicated structures.

I asked the instructor how much it would cost if I tried to get the real license and his answer was "no more than 10,000NZD". It's a quite good deal indeed. If I tried it in Japan it would cost more than 5 times this. Later, I googled the details of flight licenses and found that we can easily switch the license from other countries to Japanese. Actually not only New Zealand but many countries have flight training programs for foreigners with competitive prices. Well, maybe I'll try it in the future.

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