aperitif and then the meal arrived. Then I asked for tea, put my cup down and looked out of the porthole and saw the Eiffel Tower. New York-Paris, in the space of a lunch! Now that was really... I was blown away! It was pure emotion. I was so lucky. There are moments that mark your life!
Jean-Jacques Le Pen: My first flight? I have a pretty clear memory of it, because I'm passionate about aeroplanes. And I absolutely wanted to have an exceptional first flight. There was no way I would ask somebody to pay for it, I didn't want to. At the time, the air force was visiting small towns in the west of France and organising competitions on the histo- ry of aviation. With all the information I'd read, I knew a lot, so I won the competition and my first flight. During that flight I was already thinking about the next step: I wanted to become an air- line pilot, but I was wearing glasses. In the end, I became a pri- vate pilot at the age of 15. And I'm still in touch with people who became pilots at that time. My daughter's godfather, who star- ted flying with me, never got his baccalaureate, but he became a Boeing 777 captain: he sorted letters at the post office to pay for his training. My instructor, whom I still see, had a CAP in welding. My instructor was also a drummer in a band that played at small Saturday night balls. He used to come and play in my parents' bistro: that's how he paid for his flying hours! My best flight was with my friend Pascal Parant. We were going to visit a customer at an airfield, and the weather was really bad with a front coming in. I decided to go anyway, I gave in because Môssieur had in mind to go for lunch at a Michelin-starred res- taurant, which was an hour and a half's drive from the airfield where we were going to land. It was a very good lunch, I admit, and Pascal had stayed in the water to accompany me. On the way back from the restaurant in the taxi, we couldn't see 100 metres in front of us! That's when I realised that the return flight wasn't going to be easy. We got on the plane, soaking wet, I put in all my radio frequencies for Paris, because I knew that in the air we wouldn't be able to, that things would move a bit, and we took off: water, gas and electricity on every floor! Pascal joked with me: "It's a shame we've got the ice but not the whis- ky!” Then we lost the pitot, which was frozen (it determines the relative speed of the aircraft in relation to its surroundings) and
Charly Arslan, Vice-President & Founder of Airplane.
Charly Arslan: I haven't had the chance to fly on the Concorde, I'm too young, but I can tell you what my fondest flying
Jean-Jacques Le Pen
memory is. It was with a pilot friend, on board a Beechcraft Baron. There were four of us and we were flying to Corsica, over the Mediterranean Sea. It was magnificent, and the scenery as we approached was breathtaking. A bad memory? A night flight, departing at 11.30pm from Turkey, between Istanbul and Zaporoja in Ukraine. The flight was delayed for weather reasons. But in the end the decision was taken to fly the plane. We were 15 minutes from landing and then the tur- bulence started! We leap half a metre. I look outwards, it's sno- wing heavily, you can't see more than a metre. The pilot tells us what he's thinking: land or land somewhere else? In the end he decided to land, with a silence in the cabin the like of which I had never experienced before. I recently experienced a 'touch and go' in Toulouse, because of the wind, on an Air France flight. It's also impressive to go back on the throttle when you've just touched down on the runway. I've never experienced that befo- re, it's surprising; but it's nothing like the silence on the flight to Zaporoja...
Jean-Jacques Le Pen is a partner at LPLG Avocats, specialising in aviation law.
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