Penelope Haines

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Show notes

In this interview with New Zealand pilot, flight instructor and author, Penelope Haines, we discuss her mystery/thriller novel Death on D’Urville and talk all things flying and instructing in New Zealand!

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Liz: Hello and welcome. I’m Liz Booker, Literary Aviatrix, and I am excited to talk with the author of the December Aviatrix Book Club discussion book, Death on Duraville, a Claire Hardcastle mystery. Fewer than 10 percent of pilots and aircraft mechanics are women. These are their stories of tenacity, adventure, and courage.

Stories with the power to inspire, heal, and connect. Welcome to the Literary Aviatrix community, where we leverage the power of story to build and celebrate our community, and inspire the next generation of aviation.

Penelope Haynes, welcome. Thank you. I’m so excited to talk to you. Please, if you would introduce this really fun book that we discussed in December, Death on D’Urville.

[00:00:55] Penelope: This was my first aviation book and I had, I, I loved aviation as we all do. I fell in love with it completely and loved the job that I had done.

So I wanted to encapsulate some of that. So the heroine of the book, Claire, is an avatar, shall we say. Prettier, brighter, younger. Almost good for the braver. All those good things. So she does very much the job that I used to do, which was a flying instructor commercial pilot. We did a lot of work into the sounds, which are the sort of fjord like bits at the top of the South Island of New Zealand, which you probably know is divided into two islands.

A lot of people there had holiday homes. And we used, one of our jobs was to fly in supplies for the people in their holiday homes, or to fly them out there. Based on that sort of background, I wanted to write a gentle type of murder mystery not a hardcore forensic sort of thing, but just a gentle type of murder mystery, set around that particular sort of setting.

And because of the nature of the, in particular, Derval Island, which is a real island the It was like a very small party, an Agatha Christie type murder mystery set with very limited cast, which suited me fine for my purposes, and it just grew from there. I

[00:02:39] Liz: love it, and it suited my purposes very well.

for our December discussion book for a variety of reasons. I was excited. I’m always excited when I can read about aviation in another setting, an unusual setting or something different that I haven’t experienced. And you certainly do that in this book. We get a little taste of New Zealand and I look forward to visiting someday.

And you have this really fun character who is a little different than any other. Character that we’ve read about in the fact that she’s an instructor pilot and that’s all she wants to do, like that’s her jam. And so we loved that reading about a pilot who’s, whose purpose is to fly and she just loves doing that.

And then it was a nice light moving read to, to end out the year after we read some heavy stuff and some more dense material. And it was really nice to end the year with something light something that you could. Sit by the fire. If you live somewhere cold and cozy up and just read a fun mystery.

So I absolutely loved it, but we weren’t able to talk in December because you were recovering from an accident and it looks like you’re all put back together. Now you want to share a little bit about that.

[00:03:53] Penelope: My, I have a horse who is my. emotional support animal. There’s nothing like going for a ride to, to make the world a better place.

 On this particular day, I was riding do you use the term bush in America for forest areas?

[00:04:14] Liz: Bad. It’s, we understand it. Especially as pilots for sure. Exactly. Alright,

[00:04:18] Penelope: well riding through the bush path is a little overgrown and you’re ducking and diving and bush bashing and I ducked and didn’t stay ducked long enough.

Oh. I felt it goes, crunch was not a good feeling. not good. Oh my gosh. Did you get knocked off the horse? No, I stayed on the horse and the horse is a very sensible horse, but I broke. Two vertebrae, so

[00:04:44] Liz: Yes. Yeah. So you sent me this picture of you in a very ostentatious collar and you’re like, maybe we wanna postpone

[00:04:53] Penelope: Oh, honestly. And of course it’s summer here. So I had that on in the heat and I was just getting frantic. That is miserable. Then people from the states would send me photos of snow and I’d go away. , I have

[00:05:08] Liz: to ask, what’s your horse’s name? Bandit. Bandit. I love it. That’s great. I’m glad that you’re in one piece, that the damage wasn’t worse than it was because I know that lots of people have had really catastrophic horse accidents.

So be safe out there.

[00:05:25] Penelope: We’re glad to have you. I was a lucky girl. No, she worries about it.

[00:05:29] Liz: Yeah. Good. Glad you’re here. I can’t wait to talk about the book, but first I want to know about you. You mentioned a little bit about being a certified flight instructor, but tell us how you got into flying and then also how you got into writing just very briefly, because we’ll cover that in far more detail when we get to the writing portion of this interview.

[00:05:50] Penelope: The flying, I didn’t start, I didn’t learn to fly until I was in my forties. And it had been one of those bucket list things that married children was too busy to do. And then for one of our son’s birthdays, we gave him a couple of flying lessons as a present. And he was having such fun.

And I thought, well, I like fun. I went and I think with students whether they’re going to like flying the second that plane is six inches off the ground. Yeah, really light. You can just see some people light up and others just go. I don’t like it. And I just loved it. It was just my place.

And I loved the work I was doing. So it was, that, that was the flying part of it. Writing. Again I read widely, have done all my life and it was just inevitable that one day I would sit down and write my own stories.

[00:07:02] Liz: So well, tell us about the inception of the idea for this story then.

[00:07:08] Penelope: A lot of things came together as they do. I wanted to write a story about flying. I wanted to write a story that shared some of the things that I’d done and how much pleasure there was in, in doing them. And at the same time, I was interested in some of the historical aspects that get touched on in Death on D’Urville, about early Maori, and there’s a perpetual discussion in some portions of New Zealand society about, of course, the Māori weren’t the first people here. There were people before.

It’s been debunked fairly thoroughly, but I wanted to touch on that. I wanted to touch on a little bit of Māori culture very lightly and just have fun. So that was pretty much how it panned out. It was just a book that I had fun writing.

[00:08:04] Liz: Okay. So I thought this was a really fascinating aspect of this book that introduced me into some cultural aspects of New Zealand that I am not I knew I was aware that this was, they were a thing, but I didn’t understand where the culture was.

 And this sort of, this historical pride and the arguments over whether they were the first people or not. So that was really fascinating. Just can you say a little bit more about it for those of us who aren’t from New Zealand and maybe haven’t had a chance to read the book a little bit more about them?

[00:08:38] Penelope: About Māori. Māori, as far as any historical evidence has ever demonstrated, were the original settlers in New Zealand. Round, they’ve been here around about a thousand years. They were part of the great Pacific navigation and spread of the Polynesian people who originated somewhere in Taiwan many centuries ago and gradually worked their way down through the islands, came across from what’s called Micronesia and various places like that.

And as they came across the Pacific you could actually track them by linguistic archaeology, because certain words have stayed the same, but just slightly changed. For example, in New Zealand, if we’re in Maori, we’re going to say, hello, we say kia ora. If you’re in Rarotonga, it’s kia orana.

So just the language changes and so that’s part of the way that’s the archeologists have been able to track it. So Maori settled here. Originally I think the first excavation of Maori is in the north, north of the south island. The sort of area I’m talking about flying into where there’s a large sandpit there.

And they contract really early settlement. And when they arrived, New Zealand had no mammalian predators. Of course, Maori came and were predators and probably killed off, unfortunately, the large moa which is birds that are bigger than the ostriches that we had here as natives, and various other birds before finally working out how to live off the land and the sea and setting.

And in fact, we’ve now got a thousand odd years of Maori culture in the country. And yeah, it’s a proud heritage for them.

[00:10:37] Liz: That’s fascinating. And do most New Zealanders understand their language or speak their language?

[00:10:41] Penelope: There’s a push. It, Maori is a, an official New Zealand language. When the British came here and colonized we’re talking Victorian times, and so on. There was this attitude that natives were in some way inferior, whatever, and there was a, and because during the colonial period lots of injustices were done, land was stolen people were dispossessed, and so on and for a long period of time Māori, in fact, went into decline, and it was assumed they were a indigenous race that would just die off.

Now, the last 20, 30, 40 years, there’s been a massive resurgence, a massive growth and pride of being Maori and what it means to be Maori, and now the language is starting to form part of the European type culture as well. And it’s creeping into what the words we use.

I can’t speak it, but I do recognize the odd word. It is common now for weather forecasts and news to introduce themselves with Maori. So it’s growing.

[00:11:52] Liz: Oh that’s really cool. That’s really neat to understand. Thank you for sharing that. And I loved the way that you incorporated it into the book with, the very strong feelings about it especially with the character that is Maori in it. And how that, that threaded into the plot of the book with all these various characters.

You’ve talked about Claire already, a character that I absolutely loved. She is very strong, but she makes herself vulnerable and we get to see her softer side in some of these scenes in the book. But she’s got a thing for one of the detectives and you could see it unfolding early in the book and it fully develops later on. But tell us about the inspiration for the character Jack Body.

[00:12:43] Penelope: I wanted a male character and it so happened that I had about a year or two actually met a character in the way of business who was Probably one of the most handsome men I’ve ever seen and so I had him as this visual motif for my naturally handsome detective and just borrowed him physically really and shoved him in the book and away we went.

[00:13:18] Liz: I love it. I love it so much. Yeah. He had a great personality. I really liked that character. Your murder victim, however, was not my favorite character for obvious reasons that we won’t divulge, but you, I thought it was very interesting that you made him the complex character that seems rather benign on the surface, but there might be a reason why he ended up the way he did, and I really liked the way that you unfolded that, although I didn’t really love the difficult topic that it involved. That was really hard to read.

[00:13:56] Penelope: So yeah I think one of the things that I wanted to do was in the beginning of the book, she actually likes this character. And she’s genuinely concerned that she can’t find him.

So I quite like that creeping unfolding of information. And I think when I was writing the book, I actually went in and had quite a lot of talk with police because I needed some advice about procedural stuff that I knew nothing about. How would they—my character’s stranded at evening coming on an island and a dead body—how would the police expect you to handle this?

 So I went and had a chat with them about that. And they assured me there weren’t that very many wildly attractive men who were in a senior position in the police force and so on and so forth. But they gave me a lot of information, were very helpful.

[00:14:54] Liz: That’s great. That’s great. I think just like I was when I picked up this book, excited to read about flying in New Zealand and hear the nomenclature that you use compared to what we use.

 And we’ve been able to do that in some other books based in Australia and the UK and things like that. But can you give us like a, like if you were going to tell an American about what it’s like to fly in New Zealand and around New Zealand, how would you describe it for us?

[00:15:23] Penelope: The most difficult thing in New Zealand is the weather for flying.

 We are a thin country north, roughly north to south division with pretty much mountain range through most of the middle of it. So the sea comes in from the, sorry, the sea, the weather comes in from the west across the Tasman Sea, hits the mountains, and you get the Foehn effect coming down the other side, of course, so we essentially, particularly in the South Island, you have days where it’s nice to fly on the west of the country, you have days when you fly on the east of the country, it’s just very much a place of two halves.

And the weather can change very quickly here, where I was flying out of, which is  about 20k from where I live here. It’s a mountainous area, not Southern Alps or Rocky Mountain type things, but still probably 5,000-6,000 feet, sharp valleys. And if the wind gets up and we have a lot of wind in New Zealand, that can be quite treacherous if you’re inexperienced and you don’t know to deal with it.

So weather, be aware that. If you fly from here now, you may not get back, the weather may have changed, always have that, any pilot does of course, but always have in mind that, that thought that do not go in for getting homitis, you just have to accept that’s the way it is. So we did a lot of briefings for overseas pilots who would come and would like to hire a plane for a while to go flying around New Zealand. And it was always the briefing focused on the weather.

Most of the flying lingo is international and you would recognize it anywhere in the world. The, yeah just an awareness. Some of our procedures I did, cause we used to check out pilots obviously, some of the procedures, for example, when we do forced landings, we fly a rectangular pattern around the field that we’re planning on landing on. I’ve encountered Brits who do a spiral to achieve this.

We’re all achieving the same thing, but it’s the way different countries practice certain skills and things was interesting. Yeah but very, be aware that it changes. It’s, we are not a continental nation where you can pretty much guarantee that you’re going to have a stable mass of air for miles.

This changes fast.

[00:18:04] Liz: Oh, that’s fascinating. I’m very inspired by women who I talk to who start flying later in their lives. And I I’m starting something later in my life, which is writing. It’s not unheard of for us to all have these different phases.

There are a lot of people who start flying who can’t finish or don’t finish for whatever reason, and I’m curious about two things. What’s the ratio of women pilots in New Zealand, and what do you think set you apart from the people who don’t continue? Aside from just loving it.

[00:18:46] Penelope: That of course was, it’s a drug, isn’t it?

It really is a drug and it’s much more expensive than I imagine cocaine or whatever else you use. It really is. I started as I said, because it looked like fun. And when I, I think the thing that really fired me was that I wasn’t very good at it. I had gone into learning to fly thinking I’ve got my truck license. I can drive a tractor. I can ride a horse easy peasy if somebody else can do it, I can do it.

And of course, I found it wasn’t anywhere near as simple as that. Just simple, basic beginner things of trying to taxi down a taxiway using your feet. I probably steered straight off into the grass.

Those sorts of frustrations. When I was starting to learn to land I remember because I was bit nervous about this thing. I wanted to get it over with as fast as possible. So I’d start flaring at 300 feet, just all those sorts of, all those sorts of things. And I think the challenge of the frustration of going, why can’t I do this?

It was just. Yeah. It kept me going.

[00:20:17] Liz: Oh, that’s interesting. Do you think that the fact that you had to overcome those challenges made you—improved your ability to instruct and to identify problems?

[00:20:27] Penelope: Oh I think so. I think very much I’ve encountered it with horses as well is people who are naturals do it naturally.

 If you’ve got a problem, they have no idea how you fix it because they’ve never had to work out how to fix it. And I think flying is very much the same. If you recognize that somebody is doing something that you had problems with when you were learning, you know how to help them.  

If you were just easy peasy, and in fact, from my experience, the students that came in and you take them for the first couple of flights, and you think, ooh, good hand eye skills here coordinated, nice. They were invariably not the ones that finish. And that was, natural talent wasn’t as useful in the long run as wanting to do it.

[00:21:29] Liz: Yeah, I was going to ask you what made a really strong flight student or what advice do you have for students who are starting out?

[00:21:37] Penelope: Think carefully about the alternative career you may well need to have if you fail your medical.

[00:21:47] Liz: Yeah. Oh, 100%. I give that advice all the time. Absolutely. What my, my advice is get going, get all of the qualifications that you can get. And once you’ve established yourself, then figure out what your plan B is and start nurturing that, whether it’s a hobby, a skill, education, whatever.

 And, definitely say, medical or COVID or 9-11.

[00:22:17] Penelope: Any of those things. And to be quite honest, my heart breaks for some of the students that I had that left from us went on to the airlines and things like that. And of course, careers just fell apart really disastrously, so for so many and it was very difficult.

 A case in point was when I was doing my CCAT instructors, which is your entry level. Do you have CCAT in America or is it different term?

[00:22:49] Liz: CCAT? Are, is that like a cadet corps

[00:22:53] Penelope:  No that’s your base level instructor. Your first level instructors are.

[00:22:57] Liz: Okay. So yeah. Working toward your private pilot’s license?

[00:23:00] Penelope: No. Long past. Oh, but you’ve got a commercial license. You’re learning to be a flight instructor. I did that with a friend Tim and good pilot, qualified everything, started flying professionally with one of the smaller airlines, had a brain bleed out of nowhere.

And he was a young man he would have been as about 30 at the time. That’s it. Career over. Goes on to be a teacher. So it’s that sort of awareness that it’s a wonderful job. And if you’re lucky. You’ll have a long time in it, but there’s no counting on that.

[00:23:47] Liz: Yeah, no that’s a great point.

And one that I have emphasized many times, especially as a human resource manager for the pilots in the Coast Guard as well, just make sure that you have a backup plan and have another path to take. So the other question, the other part of that question is what made a really good student for you?

[00:24:09] Penelope: Someone who actually listens, because there’s a, there is a lot of concentrating when you’re learning to fly. You’d get an enthusiast who’d say, look, I can have a lesson this morning and I’ll come back and do another one in the afternoon or one in the evening. And you’d go no.

You go away now and you let your brain process this and you will find that when you come back tomorrow, you will have incorporated it. Just pushing the practical side doesn’t work, the brain’s got to catch up as well. So I think if it helped enormously if they had good natural coordination. Some people find, found certain parts of it really difficult.

Navigation for some people was incomprehensibly difficult. And you’d try and explain to them that a map, a chart, is just a stylized photograph of the ground that is beneath you. And they could not see it and you’d be taking them on a navigation course and say, show me where we are. What is that mountain?

And they’d go, oh, that, oh, it was a phrase I dreaded. That must be Ruapeu, or something. No, it must not be. You’re 500 miles the other direction. How can it be? Look at it. What town is that? Has it got the sea beside it? No, then why are you telling me it is that town when we’re in the middle of the country, just getting them to see things was fun, frustrating but fun by and large.

And I think it was the human element of it, that is, every pilot’s different. I used to think there were gender differences between male and female students. Obviously there are gender differences. But, man would come in from outside and go, did you see that landing? Crosswind got me at the very last minute. And I bounced.

A girl would come in and go, I stuffed that one up, but I forgot to use my feet. Total difference in approach.

[00:26:30] Liz: In whether they take responsibility or not, that’s a very interesting cultural difference, yeah.

[00:26:33] Penelope: Whether they would take responsibility for it. Yeah men and women have different strengths in the end.

They both make very good pilots, but it was a different approach. Women tended to be more conservative, I think, in many ways, more careful about a lot of things. Some guys were a bit gung ho about stuff. And gung ho’s fine. You want, need an element of it, but it’s not good as a general practice in flying.

 You need a little bit more discipline.

[00:27:09] Liz: Yeah. I, so I’m, anybody who has listened to me for any length of time knows that I abhor gender generalizations. Like the ones that we’re doing right now, but there are cultural influences that cause us to behave in different ways. And I will say that I found myself in my flying environment.

My first operational tour was in San Francisco, California, where the weather can be tricky. We have a lot of fog, obviously that comes in at low altitude and it pops in and you don’t expect it, those kinds of things. So I found myself to be the kind of pilot who started off conservative and worked her way up in my confidence to the point where I was willing to do the thing that I could do at the edge of the aircraft’s operating capability, my operating capability, whereas some of my peers. started a little too far on the other side and got themselves in trouble and had to work their way back toward me.

And I think for me, the reason I was like that is because I had been a mother for 10 years. By this time I started flying. And so I I had a little self preservation beyond just my own self interest I wasn’t immortal. I had children I wanted to go home to. So that’s how I justify that behavior.

But no, that’s a really interesting observation that goes on there. And how, so what is the ratio of women pilots in New Zealand?

[00:28:38] Penelope: I think it’s still very low, something like about 5%. It’s I was lucky at the time that I was working that I had a very good boss, who, for whom gender in flying just simply didn’t exist at all.

He was. painfully blunt if you stuffed up. And it was your response. It’s what have you done? Prior to being a pilot, I’d spent time being a management consultant, and we very much followed the model, the inclusive model. We have an issue here that we need to discuss.

No—didn’t have that with my boss. It was okay. What have you done? No spreading the blame there. And I appreciated that. I found that was refreshing. I found it. It just appealed to me.

[00:29:39] Liz: Before we go back to the books, because I’m going to, I promise, but I’m just so fascinated with the idea of flying there and your experience as an instructor there.

But in your years of flying were there any hairy moments or any big lessons learned that you want to share? Especially thinking about the weather there, like getting yourself into a sticky spot and how you manage that.

[00:30:03] Penelope: I think it very much runs along the way you were saying as you get more experienced, your skills grow, your confidence grows, and it’s the business of the, a really good pilot goes out of their way not to have to be a really good pilot because they don’t get into situations in the first place, because one of the scariest things that I had happen, and it wasn’t because it was particularly scary in itself, it was the implications.

I took a student up, we were doing circuits he was prior to going solo, and as we were turning it on to start descent, he said, I can’t pull the throttle back. And I went, oh yeah, it’s that one. I can’t shift it. So I said loosen it off. No, that wasn’t it. I put my hands on.

Fair enough. It was jammed. The throttle was jammed on and you couldn’t get it off. And nothing I did would do it. So in the end, we just, I just cut the power and we had a forced landing, which was absolutely fine. There we were, we had the field. I just had to put a call out and that’s good. What was scary about it was that immediately prior to that lesson that I got in the plane, I had sent somebody solo in that aircraft.

And although of course we do teach emergency procedures before we send them solo. There’s enough pressure on somebody doing their first solo.

[00:31:45] Liz: To not have to shut down the engines and land it, yeah, on their own.

[00:31:49] Penelope: That that still puts a chill wind down my spine, to be quite honest. It was just really awful.

[00:31:56] Liz: Yeah that, so I never had the experience of like doing the civilian flow of training is I guess it’s pretty similar with the instructors in the military at least back in the day when I was in training, they’ve now shifted to sending people to civilian training first before they put them in military aircraft.

But I just yeah, but I never had the experience of instructing a person who had never flown before and then like setting them loose in an aircraft. So that has to be like, so stressful for you.

[00:32:37] Penelope: Yeah, it was very stressful. You would, there are certain core principles before you did so, they had to, you had to fly around, do three. You never told them that you were planning on. Send them solo that day. So you didn’t put that pressure on. But you would watch and if they could do three safe landings without you having to touch the controls or interfere in any way, you would go, okay.

It didn’t have to be perfect, but it had to be, they had to be considering the things they needed to consider. And so that is when you would get out of the aircraft and basically have a nervous breakdown until they came back. Because there is always people that overload and then start shedding information that they would otherwise have access to.

You could never entirely guarantee. Fortunately, touch wood, we never had a problem. In fact, the only problem I did have was with one rather cocky chap. I never thought I had to say, only go and do one circuit. Most people are so grateful they’ve done one. So he kept doing touch and go’s for another three rounds before he came back in again and I was able to say, mmm, right, that was very good, but

[00:34:07] Liz: Oh my gosh. Yeah. You couldn’t get on the radio and be like, bring it home now.

[00:34:12] Penelope: Again, I didn’t really want to disturb where the zone, but talking about the difference between civilian and military flying. There was one student, I had who wanted to get his civilian instructor rating. He’d been in the military and he needed to get his civilian instructor’s rating.

And I found that fascinating because it was the first time I’d come up with, again, still experienced just how thorough military training is as opposed to civilian training. And we were talking here, basic. The basic lessons of effects of control, straightened level medium turns, basic sort of stuff.

And the briefing and the detail that was in the instruction that he was trying to give me, I was going no. Too much. Way too much. Cut this right back. And he didn’t. He passed. But you could see him going, but they weren’t anything. And it’s trust me, this is what the civilian training is.

And it’s nowhere near that depth. Admirable to have the time and the scope to have that kind of depth, of course.

[00:35:40] Liz: Oh, yeah. Every, we, you have check rides, obviously, in the civilian world as well, but every flight in my military training, anyway, going with the U. S. Navy in Pensacola, every single flight felt like a checkride and you had to be prepared for everything.

 Yeah I don’t know where he was in the military, but if it’s anything like ours, I believe everything you just said.

[00:36:07] Penelope: The other thing that was slightly shaming was that he was able on the, blackboard, to do this, oh, whiteboard in fact, to do this absolute impeccable straight lined briefing none of this civilians, they’re tiny, but it’s not like this was that was quite eye opening.

[00:36:32] Liz: That definitely speaks highly of his training then. And so are you still flying? No,

[00:36:37] Penelope: No, it’s, I think for me, if you’re going to, if you’re going to fly, you’ve got to fly well. This is not something that you can do poorly. And after having done it as a job, I wasn’t going to be terribly interested in going around and doing circuits every three months just to keep my hand in.

That wouldn’t have interested me or excited me at all. And frankly, if you’re doing it as a private person, it’s a jolly expensive exercise. I decided that no, but it was like going cold turkey. One of the reasons I probably had early onset whiplash almost was that every time a plane goes overhead I still go, yeah!

[00:37:32] Liz: Yeah. I, flying as a civilian, I don’t have the time or the resources or the proximity to an airport to do it with any regularity. And having been extremely proficient in the military, my expectations of myself to be out there on a regular basis are extremely high.

And so like you, I wouldn’t do. And also, it just costs a ton of money. So I would not do what you’re saying go out and maintain currency, minimum currency, just so that I could say, go take an airplane out. So what I do now is I fly recreationally. Mostly I go gliding because it’s very affordable.

And I go with an instructor friend who is very proficient and is actively flying professionally. So just to keep my hand in it. And someday I hope to live somewhere where I maybe have a little better proximity and access and maybe not so many responsibilities at home taking up my time so that I can keep flying.

[00:38:32] Penelope:

It’s, it is a, as I said, I found it almost an addiction because I enjoyed it so much, definitely over a varied career, definitely the best job that I’d ever had. Because it appealed on so many levels for me, I wouldn’t have wanted to fly, I didn’t want to fly a large intercontinental aircraft from place to place.

I think it would bore me silly going in a straight line. I enjoyed the options of aerobatics. I enjoyed the variety of mountain flying or strip flying. I enjoyed the commercial work. I very much enjoyed the teaching because it’s that sharing of seeing somebody else come to life with something that is a passion of yours.

So yeah, I really, and I enjoyed the intellectual side of it as well. It’s lovely to learn stuff. And if you’re a pilot, you’re always learning something, you’re always sitting exam or something all the time. So I found that immensely satisfying. So yeah very satisfying job on every level.

[00:39:48] Liz: It feels really good to when you when I’m just thinking about the volume of things that you need to learn to become proficient at something like that.

It’s very challenging. And so it feels really good when you can master it. And I see in Claire Hardcastle, your character, all of the things that you’re talking about. She obviously really loves flying and instructing. And this is not her only story that you’ve made. So we’ve, this is the first in a trilogy.

Tell us about the other books. What can we expect in the sequels?

[00:40:19] Penelope: A similar format in the sense that they are murder based somewhere along the line, Claire stumbles over a body. It’s as simple as that, it’s got the

[00:40:32] Liz:  She’s just got the bad luck.

[00:40:33] Penelope: Part of a pilot’s daily life, really.

But anyway the next one focuses more, she’s still an instructor. She’s still working in the local area. It focuses, the plot revolves ‘round people trying to bring in diseases into New Zealand because we’re a small island and things for commercial reasons they wanted to get rid of a certain portion of the popular of the of agricultural industry so they could benefit from it overseas.

So it focuses on that. But again, there’s lots of flying and the bad is the suitably bad. And again, a lot of the experiences that I had with flying people into their more, fying into strips and things, one of the jobs that I did was they were building a batch we call them the holiday home in the sounds.

And we were doing a large part of flying, sometimes building stuff in for them and trying to persuade civilians, that the ideal place for putting a small box of really heavy nails is not right down the back of the plane in the tail, just because it’s small, but you want that up the front and you talking about somebody loading up a plane and the tail tipping back and have to correct things like that.

So yeah, a lot of my own experiences, the places that I flew into.

[00:42:19] Liz: And so this, the second book is Straight and Level, correct?

[00:42:22] Penelope: Straight and Level. And the third one is Stall Turns, where I’ve taken her out of the environment that of working. She is still a partner, but she’s on holiday. After all she’s been through in the first two weeks.

 And she goes up to meet her partner, Jack’s family, and gets taken as part of the activities, goes out on a sheet muster. Where various things happen. But she does, of course, spend walk into a swamp and find a dead body as Claire does, and it all goes from there.

[00:43:04] Liz: That’s so great. I know that this is not, these are not your only books.

So tell us about your other work as well.

[00:43:10] Penelope: The other thing that I really enjoy writing about is history. I like historical novels. The first, the very first novel I ever wrote was called The Lost One, and it’s very loosely based on my own family’s story. My mother’s family my mother, had to flee from Moscow in the Russian Revolution.

Her father was shot as a spy as they were escaping the country so that the newly widowed wife and her children arrived in London as refugees, basically, after the Russian Revolution. And so that my heroine follows a similar early life format and then develops skills as a seamstress, as a dress designer, and then marries and develops a fashion stall. But it’s it incorporates a lot of my own family story and things like that. There’s an adopted child in it and there’s all sorts of things and of course it gets back to New Zealand. Soon, at some point as well.

So that, that was quite fun. And having done that, and enjoyed that, the second one I wrote was simply, a story I always knew. I’ve always liked Greek myths. I was, my father was a bit of a classicist, so I, they were my fairy tales. And I’d always wanted to tell the story of Clytemnestra, the, she’s known for murdering her husband when he comes back from the Trojan War.

 And the reason she does so is that he, as he left home to go to the Trojan War sacrificed their eldest daughter so that they got good winds for his fleet to go to Troy. Now, Clytemnestra didn’t really appreciate having her daughter murdered, so payback time. But I always wanted to tell that particular story, because it’s always written that she’s the baddie, or usually written from a male perspective, whereas you think actually, no. I think she’s got quite a lot going for her so yeah, so I enjoyed that. And

[00:45:33] Liz: So you wrote this in a fictional, like a fictional story based on this. Yeah. Using the same character’s name?

[00:45:37] Penelope: Using the same characters. Yeah. Just a retelling of it in a slightly different way from a slightly sympathetic point of view from her point of view.

And the last historical one that I have got out is Blood Never Lies. I became fascinated by Vikings. And we, I gave my husband and he gave me a one of these DNA tests for Christmas and mine came back fairly boring to be quite honest. I’m my family lines are Irish and I’m a hundred percent Irish, peasant probably for several hundred years. So that wasn’t very interesting, but my husband’s came back and he’s English and he obviously expected it to be pretty much standard English bloodlines. But his was something like 48 percent Scandinavian and then some Eastern European in there and goodness knows a whole hodgepodge of stuff.

And I thought, now that is really interesting. How, because he had no idea of this, how did that happen? And of course, if you’re talking about how did you get Scandinavian bloodlines, of that sort of percentage, if you’re English probably there was a Viking somewhere in there at some point, or I chose to make that the reason.

And the whole business of Viking raids around England, Ireland, centered that story. But also, of course, they went right through to through the Mediterranean, they went through the river systems, through to Constantinople, for many centuries, or for several centuries. Vikings formed the Guard of Honor in Byzantium in Constantinople, the Varangian Guard.

And they actually got as far as the Caspian Sea and the lands around there. So the sequel I’m working on at the moment focuses on that end of the Viking tale as a seq loosely based sequel for the previous one.

[00:47:54] Liz: Oh, that’s exciting. When can we expect that?

[00:47:55] Penelope: Yes. It’s going slowly to be quite honest. Hopefully later this year.

[00:48:00] Liz: Okay. We look forward to checking those out. And before we wrap up and start talking about writing, I have two questions. One, is there anything else that you wanted to talk about that we haven’t covered for Claire or these books?

[00:48:18] Penelope: Not really. No. I think we’ve given a good flavor for what the books are about and where you’re going.

[00:48:28] Liz: Yeah. I don’t want to give too much away because it’s a mystery, so we don’t want to tell you too much. You have to go read the book. And then did the boy, your son who took those flying lessons, did he ever go on to fly beyond that?

[00:48:40] Penelope: He got his private pilot’s license and then moved to Sydney where he greatly impressed this young woman on their first date by flying her up the coast of the Hunter Valley for lunch, I believe, on their first date. They have now been married something like 15 years, and she still says that it was the most impressive first date she’d ever been on. So yeah, so you know that there’s a profit to be made out of doing, getting your license.

That’s wonderful. Claire, thank you so much for your books. This again was such a refreshing and different twist to read in the book club, to see things from a New Zealand perspective and to see things from a flight instructor’s perspective at the same time that we get to live this fun and interesting mystery that you unravel in this book.

So thank you so much for that. And we look forward to reading the rest of the books in the series, Straight and Level and Stall Turns. Where can people find you?

[00:49:49] Penelope: Amazon. Amazon is the best place to get them because you can get them internationally wherever you are in the world and yeah definitely the best place.

And please, if you do buy a book from Amazon, leave a review. It’s really helpful.

[00:50:09] Liz: How many times have you heard this if you’ve listened to my podcast? Review the books because reviews help sell our books and which makes them more visible online and hopefully brings women in aviation to more, to a broader audience so that more people know that women can fly.

[00:50:01] Penelope: I have no idea why they don’t because it’s one of it’s something that is so easy for women to do and yet why they don’t actually go into it. I don’t know.

[00:50:33] Liz: Thank you. Penelope.

[00:50:35] Penelope: And thank you, Liz, very much. I really appreciate you coming on this and I hope your audience enjoy it.

[00:50:43] Liz: Thanks so much for listening. I’d like to thank Michael Wildes of Massif & Kroo for his help in producing this interview. Massif & Kroo is empowering voices, building brands, and shaping cultures. Blue skies and happy reading.