Flying Through Retirement

Flying at 200 km/h, the ground speeding past, and there’s nothing but the vast Australian outback ahead, and clear blue sky above, and the pilot? A 73-year-old woman.

Pat Lalor did not let retirement slow her, or her husband Ron, down.

“I started to learn to fly when I was 55, because I thought I'd better learn to land the aeroplane in case he had a heart attack. I got a bit scared, why two die instead of one? What a waste!"

The now 87-year-old retiree reflects on her 20 years of flying as “…just amazing, when you’re up so high, you can just see the formation of the land.”

As Pat grew older, she learnt to find what she wanted, and plunge headlong into it, whether it be flying for the first time, or getting married in her 50s.

“Ron and I married in 1980, and 1979 I think we met… that was our second marriage, for both of us… We had no children at home and we hit it off so we decided to get married, and that was when I was aged 50, he was 56. And he had been a pilot in World War II, so he kept his private license when he came out of the air force.”

From there the determined retiree put everything she had in learning to fly.

“I got lessons at Hoxton Park Aeroclub…I had the same instructor, and I did a month’s intensive flying; almost every day. And I got my basic license at the end of the month because I got a lot of hours up.”

Pat did in one month what takes most people years to accomplish, and soon she was up an away, flying across all of Australia.

“Well everywhere: Adelaide, Swan hill, Long Reach, Charters Towers, the Rock, Alice Springs, Katherine, Darwin.”

Even though it has been many years since those first fantastical fly’s, Pat has never forgotten the sheer fear and joy that comes with being a pilot traversing the skies of Australia.

“It was the noise, the intense noise, you’d get in and you’d start an aircraft engine. Oh my God it’s so different to a car. You know, and its vroom! And you can just feel that surge of power, and you think, my God, how can we harness this? So, it is scary. But, if you don’t want to fly, you’re not a game person.”

However, there’s also been a few close calls in Pat’s flying career, with some being far closer than she would have liked.

“We were flying from Hoxton Park to Bankstown, and we saw a storm coming, but what we didn’t see was another storm behind it, which overtook that first one that we, and it caught up with us at Bankstown. So we had to jump out of the aircraft and run away from it, and leave it there. But we were lucky it didn’t blow the aircraft over.”

Despite several other windstorms, and one fire that burnt through their caravan destination, Pat developed a deep, and passionate love for her newfound recreation, one that she was hard pressed to let go of.

“The last one? Well I didn’t realise it was the last one. But I felt quite regretful about having left flying behind and it was for health reasons. So, I had to leave it behind. But I wasn’t ready to leave it behind.”