What could be better on a sunny Wednesday afternoon
When the fluffy white clouds start to form
In a bright blue sky, and everyone else is hard at work
Than to go to one’s flying club
“Propellerheads” is the flying club where we will test fly the plane built by students at Petroc college. The airfield has a short grass runway and two hangars, which look exactly like old barns. They are old barns. About ten aeroplanes belong to club members, and unlike the internally hoseable flying toilets operated by EasyJet, they are flown and loved by the people who operate them. Each plane has its own space in a hangar. As we are new, our space is at the back so we have to move all the other planes out before we can take ours outside to fiddle around with.
In a society that is obsessed with gender identity, a Propellerheads hangar is better than any chemical test or physical examination to validate the claim to mandom. Science can be safely thrown away. This totally definitive test exposes stereotypical male / female taste and behaviour. It’s a tricky business sorting this out, as Nicola Sturgeon and J K Rowling have both discovered. The problem is that some people deliberately misrepresent their gender identity. The Propellerheads hangar test solves this problem. It is infallible. It shouts male or female to every sense. No impostors.
Put any human being inside a Propellerheads hangar, stand back and observe. Aeroplanes dominate the scene but then your eyes pick up that each plane is surrounded by owner junk. Some stuff you would expect: tools, oil cans, fuel cans, wings, engines, propellers have an aviation connection. But look at the way things are arranged. The occupants seem to have left in a hurry. Paint tins and glue pots have brushes left in them. Spanners are still attached to bolts. Items that have been dismantled lay frozen in suspended animation patiently waiting to be remantled. Things are strewn across the floor. Odd discards of nuts and bolts lay between them. The floor surface varies. Dusty concrete is provided free within the rent, but some members have added carpet for… a homely, domestic touch? No. Not that. Wrong. Carpet is strictly functional. Everything is functional. Carpet is there because it is nicer to kneel or lay on if you are working down there on the ground. It is not coordinated carpet. It looks like offcuts that you might expect to find if you pulled them out of a skip, which you probably did. Carpets? If your test specimen looks around for a hoover that’s another giveaway. A genuine man knows there isn’t a hoover because there isn’t a need for a hoover. A carpet can absorb as much dirt or oil as fate decides to place on it. No need to disturb it. It has an infinite carrying capacity. There’s also no curtains or cushions.
As always, where men are free to nest away from female supervision, other junk finds its way along. Something of the wider interests of club members can be deduced from their accessorising. It comes as no surprise, to a genuine man (with or without willy), to see essential items that a non bona fide man might think has only a tenuous link to aviation. Examples are: a cricket bat, an air rifle, sea fishing regalia, a sideboard, two sawhorses with a slab of MDF placed over the top of them in the style of a table, with every square inch of its surface covered with what looks like junk. A genuine male (even one without biological male parts) would know there is no possibility of moving even one tiny little item, so much as one millimetre and getting away with it. This junk is actually not randomly abandoned. It is systematically left, stored in memory, probably by someone who departed suddenly because they “didn’t realise how late it was”. Anyone who attempts to tidy up, put away, clean, organise and or leave it in any way other than its time and space frozen state, is indisputably, and fundamentally not male.
Then, to catch out impostors someone else in the hangar has a tidy space with a clear workbench (rather than an half-arsed improvised MDF table). This offers no evidence of feminine infiltration. Some men, especially ex-professional aviators, or engineers from the armed services, are obsessively organised and tidy. Some even place uniquely number stamped metal tokens in the space where they have removed an item (a spanner from a toolset) and then use their token reference system to find the correct place to put the item back, and they will always put all items back and leave nothing out before going home. They also do things like check the tyre pressures on their car more than once a year. These men are not fakes posing as men or men repressing their inner female. They are on the spectrum. Back in the days of science it was an accepted scientific fact that more men rather than women were on the spectrum. These men also catalogue and classify things such as books, record collections (they still have them), steam engines they have observed etc. But and this is a gender test “but”, they would know not to mess with another man’s mess. They might have contempt for it, but they will observe the fundamental male human right to mess.
[If you can name 20 objects in this photograph and explain why they are there, you are irrefutably a man]
Finally, the smell. Anyone who cannot instantly decode and list its constituents as; engine oil, thinners, petrol, damp, Swarfega, solder, is not a man. It’s not easy. It all hangs together in a blended fug that is probably cancerous, but so what? this is a place where schoolboy fantasies about the Battle of Britain hang in the air. The valorising of risk is another test of male culture. If you sat them in a circle and asked them to suggest a subject to discuss, like any other group of men (motorcyclists, cricketers, football fans, cage fighters) they would be totally mystified. Such a question would imply there is another subject to discuss. In the flying club circle, there is only one subject; flying. As they talk their hands move to re-enact a plane doing manoeuvres and the discussion invariably progresses to mishaps, near misses, being caught in bad weather, low light, without a radio, encroaching into controlled airspace etc etc. Stereotypical females do not have the same interest as boys (male ones) in the thrills and talk of physical danger, dares, recklessness, or the same temptation to exaggerate and embellish reality as part of their tribal ritual. I have never been there to hear a circle of women in a pub, jaw-jawing about events or people but my hunch is that if I had, I would find no end to the other matters they can talk about other than the one they agreed to meet and discuss and there would be no tolerance of fictitious bravado.
Anyway, Nicola, FIFA, and everyone else who needs to establish whether a subject is genuinely male or not by assessing the sincerity of stereotypical male behaviour – hangar for hire.
