Philippa Stevenson: So this is why they call it the joystick

You'd think in the age of mass air travel, terrorist hijackings and computerised cockpits that the romance would be gone from flying.

It is 102 years since our very own farmer-inventor, Richard Pearse, flew for about 140m before crashing into a gorse hedge on his Waitohi, South Island, property - eight months before the Wright Brothers entered the record books at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17, 1903.

Once we humans cottoned on to tricks that put us up there with the birds we certainly made the best - and the worst - of the elevation.

We made the world smaller with the ability to travel across it at speed, and we made it more dangerous by being able to rain death from the skies.

Ultimately, perhaps, the most far-reaching effect to come from flight may be the package holiday. We camera-toting masses swarming locust-like across the planet may promote a new level of understanding between nations. Or be more destructive to the world's precious places than the Taleban in a dynamite mood.

Have developments good and bad in soaring through the clouds wiped out our fascination with flight?

Not for Ian Calvert, chief instructor at the new Waikato pilot training centre of UK-based CTC Aviation.

Like Pearse, Calvert was a farmer when the flying bug bit. The Pukekawa dairy farmer and son of one-time dairy industry heavyweight Graham Calvert first took to the air, as many do, at an aero club.

He went on to study at Massey University and qualified as a flight instructor.

Now, grinning from ear to ear, he says he's got the "best job in the country in the instructing field".

Calvert heads a team of 18 instructors in a beautifully appointed, 1800sq m training centre just off the runway at the Waikato regional airport.

The instructors are teaching about 60 trainee pilots and over a year will oversee about 120 who will rotate between Hamilton and CTC centres in Britain.

Calvert's rapt with the state-of-art resources provided by the company whose clients include British Airways, easyJet and Thomas Cook Airlines.

The centre has been in business since January but was officially opened by Prime Minister Helen Clark on Friday, a formality that set the seal on six months of speedy building that impressed British-based CTC chief executive Chris Clarke.

He doubts a building would be above ground, let alone have any pilots training in it, if the project had been launched in Britain only last October as it was here.

"It's an excellent environment to do business," says Clarke, a former airline pilot whose entrance to the planned Waikato "aviation cluster" was eased with a $4.2 million loan from Hamilton ratepayers.

Just as delighted that CTC's 15 small aircraft (with five more to come) are buzzing around our skies are recruits Briton Damien Pickford and Aucklander Hayden Earle.

Pickford got the urge to be a pilot after flying in small planes during a holiday in New Zealand. He spent two years in army officer training and a few more studying history and politics but now his heart's set on piloting the planes of his country's flag carrier, British Airways.

Ask him why and the answer comes easily. "The romance is still there whatever people tell you and," he smiles broadly, "they have big, shiny planes."

Earle thought he would have a career in communications before realising he really wanted to follow the flight path of his father, an Air NZ pilot.

"There's just no problem getting up in the morning at all." After an hour up in one of the little planes whose cockpit is no bigger than a Mini, I, too, reckon that my morning would start well at the thought of another day in such an office.

Pickford might be flying a mosquito compared to Boeing or Airbus eagles but he has all the assured manner of a seasoned pilot of the big, shiny planes he aspires to.

We wheel to look at the secondary school rowing champs on Lake Karapiro, peer down at Hobbiton and scoot by the Waitoa dairy factory.

He demonstrates the Diamond DA20's ability to glide and lets me have control of the joystick long enough for me to be astounded at how the slightest pressure on it can change the plane's direction.

I blot my copybook by easing us right when he says left but that doesn't stop me excitedly overstating the experience later to anyone that'll listen. "I flew a plane today!"

Our fascination with flight is over? Bah humbug.