Five Miles Out

General CommentI'd Love to know where Mike got the Lyrics for this song?? Has he flown before (If so COOL!) I've always liked this song in particular the few opening bars!! Super-cool... (But then I'm a Flying Geek so what do I know?)

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General CommentOldfield got his pilot's license in 1980, so yes, he's flown.

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General CommentMike wrote this song in response to an experience he had. Although he has his own pilot's licence he was being flown to a gig somewhere in Europe, I think Spain, with some other crew. The pilot thought he could get around an oncoming storm, but got caught up in it. The resulting trip left everybody a wreck as they thought they were going to die. After landing they found out that they had been the only plane in the air and everything else was grounded. Mike wasn't too happy with the pilot.

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Song MeaningAs @andy106298 described, this song was written by Oldfield after a frightening experience in an aircraft in bad weather. The lyrics of the song draw heavily (but not accurately) on aviation jargon and radio procedure. Oldfield\'s use of technical terms involves a lot of poetic license.\n\n"You\'ve got thirty degrees" -- probably thirty degrees of bank, i.e. the aircraft is not flying level, but is tilted thirty degrees to one side.\n\n"you\'re stalling out" -- an aerodynamic stall is not the same as stalling a car motor; in an aerodynamic stall, the aircraft is traveling below the speed at which the wings can generate lift, so it begins to fall and -- if no action is taken -- will crash.\n\n"hold your heading true" -- heading is a compass heading, so to \'hold your heading true\' would be to keep flying in the correct direction\n\n"you\'re number one" -- with these words, the traffic controller advises the pilot that he is first in line for landing.\n\n"Mayday!" -- internationally recognized code for distress, derived from the French "m\'aidez", meaning "help me"\n\n"Golf-Mike-Oscar-Victor-Juliet" -- the call sign used by the aircraft, spelled out in the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet, which assigns each letter of the alphabet a different word. The words are chosen for their distinct sounds, making them hard to confuse. The call sign in this case is G-MOVJ, where the \'G\' designates an aircraft registered in the United Kingdom. It\'s not clear whether G-MOVJ was the actual registration/callsign of the aircraft involved, or if Oldfield simply chose this because it sounded good.\n\n"IMC" - Instrument Meterological Conditions: a technical term used in aviation to described weather conditions where visibility is so poor that pilots cannot use any visual clues -- i.e. what they can see outside the cockpit -- to help them navigate. Instead, they have to use the aircraft\'s instruments such as the compass, artificial horizon, altimeter etc. and signals from electronic beacons. Flying under \'instrument flight rules\' under instrument meteorological conditions requires special training; some pilots are cleared for visual flight rules only. In the context of the song, \'IMC\' simply means that the weather is very bad.\n\n"cu. nimb." -- abbreviation for cumulo-nimbus, the technical term for thunderclouds.\n\n"icing" -- ice is accumulating on the aircraft\'s wings and control surfaces, affecting its performance. Taken together with the previous phrases, the pilot of the aircraft is reporting a bad situation: very poor visibility, thunderstorms in the area, and ice build-up that could affect the aircraft\'s ability to fly.\n\n"traffic controller" -- the air traffic controller responsible for guiding the aircraft to its destination\n\n"Victor-Juliet" -- last two letters of the aircraft\'s callsign in the IRSA (see above)\n\n"your identity I have lost" -- the suggestion seems to be that the controller cannot see the aircraft on their radar display, or they are not receiving the transponder signal that identifies the aircraft, probably due to electrical interference from the storm\n\n"communicate or squawk \'emergency\'" -- the controller is instructing the pilot either to respond verbally -- \'communicate\' -- or by programming an emergency code into their transponder. The transponder (transmitter-responder) is a device that normally sends an identifying code for the aircraft, but can also be used to transmit one of a small set of emergency codes, which will show up on the controller\'s radar display. If electrical interference from a thunderstorm made verbal communication impossible, a pilot might be able to signal an emergency by entering one of these \'squawk codes\' into their transponder, thus letting the controller know that they are in trouble.\n\n"the evil eye of the hurricane" -- the metaphor doesn\'t quite work, because the eye of a hurricane is a patch of still air at the center of the hurricane; the calmest, least threatening part of the storm.

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