What Does This Button Do?

by Bruce Dickinson

  It was Gatwick to Faro, a full flight with 148 passengers on a very old and beaten-up 737-300. After British World went bust, Astraeus had inherited their two rather long-in-the-tooth 737-300s. It was a glorious day and, from 150 miles out, Faro gave us a radar vector for a 12-mile visual final. Basically, the sky was ours. I descended, turned right towards the runway and started to slow down. I could see the threshold.

  ‘Visual, disconnecting autopilot.’

  The aural alarm of the autopilot being disconnected was silenced by a second push of the button. My eyes were firmly out of the window, judging the final approach visually.

  ‘Flaps, one,’ I commanded.

  The captain’s hand positioned the flap lever to one.

  ‘Speed, one-ninety.’

  The training captain rotated the speed knob to read 190. I reduced thrust.

  ‘Flaps, five. Speed, one-eighty.’

  I glanced down at the airspeed. She wasn’t slowing down very much. Shit.

  ‘Gear down. Flaps, 15. Speed, one-fifty.’

  The racket of the gear dropping into the airflow sounded comforting, but we were 1,200 feet above the ground and still not slowing down.

  ‘I’ll give you a hand,’ the training captain said, and he reached for the speedbrake and pulled it all the way out. The speedbrake is two barn doors on each wing that raise into the slipstream, destroying lift and increasing drag. We slowed down a bit, but not nearly enough.

  At 800 feet the aircraft shuddered and the control wheel juddered violently as the stick shaker activated. We were on the point of stalling, and Mr Boeing wants you to know so he installed a system to rattle your nerves should you approach a stall. This is the stick shaker system, which does exactly that.

  I glanced down. The flap lever was at 15, but the flap gauge told a different story. No flaps had deployed. No wonder we hadn’t slowed down. I was looking out the window; the training captain was probably monitoring my flying. But the fact remained that we were on the point of stalling at 800 feet with 148 passengers.

  ‘Going around,’ I declared, but this was a rather different situation. I reverted, under stress, to the 757 and firewalled the throttles.

  ‘Shit. Don’t do that – the engines will melt!’ said the training captain.

  The 737 had no automatic protections like the 757. In any case, I started a very shallow left turn out towards the ocean as the speed increased. With the airspeed at a more sensible 210 knots we entered the hold offshore at 2,000 feet. We would have only 20 minutes to sort this out before fuel became critical. As it happened, all the efforts to get any flaps or slats to deploy were useless. After 10 minutes the only option was a landing with no flaps and no slats at Faro.

  ‘I think you’d better do this one,’ I said to the captain, before checking the performance tables to see if we would stop or go off the end of the runway.

  We were within two or three miles per hour of the maximum tyre speed as we touched down at over 200 miles per hour. To Boeing’s eternal credit, the 737 stopped with 150 feet to spare and we disgorged our passengers. We never found out how the problem arose. The local Portuguese engineers wanted to take the wing apart there and then. We decided to phone home, E.T.-style, and call our own engineers.

  Their advice was blunt: ‘Switch the aircraft off. Wait 15 minutes, then switch it back on again.’

  So we did, and it worked. The Portuguese engineers went away grumpy.

  That summer, I flew all over the place: Funchal, Innsbruck and Sharm El Sheikh, plus all the usual holiday spots – Greek islands, Alicante, Málaga and Palma de Mallorca.

  I had such a torrid time on the 737 groundschool course that I offered to write a study guide for new pilots. Having written it, I was then co-opted into the training department and packed off to Amsterdam to run groundschool courses and debrief exams. I was supposed to be a wild and crazy drug-fuelled rock star, but here I was in a simulator teaching company-standard operating procedures. Go figure.

  I really enjoyed it. I remembered how hard I’d found it on occasions when I first started training, and I was determined to encourage others not to give up when the going got tough, as it inevitably did at some point.

  I was still fencing, but not with any degree of expectation of the success I’d had 10 years before. I was 43 years old and still in pretty good shape, but I was starting to pick up injuries – and they lasted longer. The foil is a mobile weapon, heavy on the legs. I was lucky that my legs were well-maintained by hurtling around on stage with Maiden. In the heat of competition, though, the springs became a bit creaky just that little bit sooner than the opposition’s, to my intense annoyance and their benefit.

  I flew 300 hours in the 737 during the summer and autumn of 2002. By now, Astraeus had added a pair of new-generation 737 aircraft to the fleet, and in the space of a year we had four aircraft.

  Some of those aircraft were old, and equipment failures often meant that pilots had to actually hand-fly them. One day I turned up for work, where Gatwick to Athens and back was the mission, except the plane was broken and all its autopilots were not working. I expected to be back in my bed at home watching late-night TV around 1 a.m. In fact, that was the time I eventually took off. We hand-flew the aircraft to Athens and back overnight, finally landing at 9 a.m. I was so tired I could hardly see the white lines on the road driving home. I pulled over and slept for three hours. Character-building stuff.

  By contrast, going on tour with Iron Maiden was like going on holiday. The looming Give Me Ed Till I’m Dead tour was a great escape to warm up the vocal pipes before the official Dance of Death album tour, which would spill into 2004.

  The album, of course, was already in the can. We had recorded in the urban bohemia that was Notting Hill in West London. The studios, now called SARM West, had quite a history. Jimi Hendrix had lived in an apartment upstairs, and a huge sunken bath had been installed at the request of Bob Marley, who clearly enjoyed a good soak with his smoke. The whole album, for me, was not quite as good as Brave New World. It was as if we had a little creative hangover and were trying just that little bit too hard to top the previous effort. The one exception, in my opinion, was Adrian’s solo composition ‘Paschendale’.

  It was jaw-dropping lyrically, musically and emotionally. It gave us a set piece to recreate on stage. I set about doing that with barbed wire, dummy bodies and portable searchlights to rake the audience.

  The cover was also controversial. A partially finished version was presented as a work in progress, but Steve loved it and was not to be shifted. Personally, I still find it embarrassing. We had such a tradition of extraordinary and iconic covers that I couldn’t help feeling that maybe the artist should have had a little more say, seeing as the visual was his essential medium. The artist was so mortified that he withdrew his name from the album credits. I didn’t blame him.

  I was flying the pants off the 737 for Astraeus right up to the Give Me Ed Till I’m Dead tour. Looking back now at the schedule, it was gruelling and the pressure was on, because we were now headlining arenas at a minimum, with outdoor shows accounting for almost a quarter of the total gigs. The idea was to set up the Dance of Death album with what was essentially a greatest-hits tour.

  The Give Me Ed Till I’m Dead tour was the not-so-subtle double entendre that lasted for over 50 shows and three months across two continents. Give Me Ed rolled straight into the Dance of Death tour, I resumed flying the 737 and put in another 100 hours in between the 40 European shows. All the ‘heavy iron’ flying was well and good, but I yearned for something more interesting and romantic. I bought a share in a German biplane, a Bücker Jungmann.

  Dating back to before the Second World War, the Jungmann was a primary trainer for the Luftwaffe. It was open cockpit, fabric and wood, and operated from grass runways. Better still, it spun beautifully, and in the right hands (not mine) it was a graceful aerobatic aircraft. Not only that, but I swear that it improved my jet landings. It was a reconnection with the element
s.

  Dance of Death blitzed the world again in January 2004: Latin and North America, then Japan. We played the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles for two nights. The crowd was surprisingly boisterous for such a plush venue, and I went flying, but not in the way I normally intended.

  Trips, slips and falls are part of the risks associated with leaping around stages, juggling microphones and guitars. Over the years I have fallen over in front of thousands of people and usually got back up relatively unscathed. Janick was not so lucky at a show in Mannheim, Germany. He fell head first into a steel girder, tumbling several feet to the ground. I was horrified – I thought he was dead. His body lay at the foot of the stage, his limbs arranged unnaturally by his loss of consciousness, his head covered in blood. He was not moving, and I couldn’t see if he was even breathing. It happened in a heartbeat – one slip and he was gone. It took Janick several weeks – months, in fact – to recover fully. My demise was equally sudden, and was indirectly attributable to Janick’s birthday celebrations.

  In the early days, birthdays were things to be celebrated, especially when we were not so old as to be candidates for radiocarbon dating, or counting tree rings. Celebrations normally ended up with paper plates of shaving foam being splattered over the hapless band member.

  Latterly, we’d learnt that shaving foam tasted pretty disgusting and stung like hell, so we relented and used whipped cream instead. A couple of the excess whipped-cream-pie plates were placed on top of the catwalks at the rear of the stage, just adjacent to the front corner of Nicko’s drum riser. The wood that comprised the floor of the catwalk was painted matt black. The cream soaked into the wooden boards and remained invisible, but it was slippery like an oil slick. I was in the habit of running up to the edge and making great drama of my emergency stop – except, on this occasion, I didn’t stop. My head went from 12 feet above the stage to impact in a fraction of a second. It happened so fast that the band didn’t notice; so fast, I was disappointed to discover, that my plummet wasn’t even captured on video. Where was a handy bootlegger when you needed one?

  Like most accidents, things go in slow motion until impact. After that it hurts. As I tried to slide to a stop, I went head first towards the drum kit.

  Make a plan, I thought, protect ribs at all costs – tuck and roll. But I had a bass drum and a set of aluminium steps to fall over before I actually struck the stage itself. I stretched out my left arm, which was not holding the microphone. I would try to bounce off the bass drum then forward-roll onto the stage.

  I had figured without the cymbal stands, and the gap between my little finger and ring finger caught on the spigot sticking out from a crash cymbal. It wrenched my left arm behind me, ripping my chest muscles and twisting my back so I went backwards into the kit. I was still holding the mic after I rolled and stood up. I carried on, but the pain was intense. The next night was the same, and then we all flew to Japan. I was a pathetic mess.

  At the first show in Japan, my back gave way and I spent the next four weeks hobbling around – the first week of it with the aid of a stick.

  I was supposed to return to LA to finish the vocals on the Tyranny of Souls album. Roy had sent me various backing tracks, and I wrote the lyrics while limping around the streets wearing headphones.

  I duly arrived back in LA and set up a bed by the side of the microphone in Roy’s home studio. I could manage about five minutes of singing before I had to have a lie down. I was not a happy bunny, but remarkably the album sounded amazing. It was released with little in the way of fanfare, but it has garnered a steady following over the years.

  The Spruce Bruce

  My aviating had led to an approach from a TV company who wanted to make a show for the Discovery Channel. The title was Flying Heavy Metal.

  I had made music videos and was still busy juggling the script of Chemical Wedding, but TV documentaries were uncharted territory. Like everything else, it was a learning curve, and a steep but enjoyable one.

  The initial idea was quite unstructured, and mainly based on the idea of me wandering around and flying planes. I am not a fan of celebrity-based shows. I wanted a proper structure and a story. The style of presentation could allude to the celebrity angle, but the content had to be rock solid underneath. Ricochet, the production company, wanted three months to film five half-hour episodes; I told them I could do it in a third of that time, including two weeks in the USA.

  As a result, the schedule was pretty tight, with long shooting days, but the results were fantastic. There was always a degree of tension over the script, which was dumbed down and which I frequently ignored, rewriting it on the hoof.

  Most of the best bits of the interviews I did never made it into the series, otherwise we would have been making 10 one-hour shows, and then we really would have been filming for three months.

  Typical was the session where I flew the prototype Airbus A320. Because it was full of experimental equipment I could legally fly it with a test pilot on board. Consequently, I could do things that most Airbus pilots have only done in a simulator, tail sliding over the Pyrenees, engines at idle being just one of them. The Airbus has all kinds of protections built into its normal flight controls to prevent mishandling, and one is that the aircraft control system will not permit a bank angle in excess of 60 degrees.

  The director had the camera pointed at me from the back, and GoPro cameras were capturing my face. He was wedged out of sight, lying on the flight-deck floor behind my seat.

  ‘Can you say, “Sixty degrees and the Airbus says roll no more”?’ he shouted as I rolled the aircraft on its side.

  ‘Okay,’ I replied, and said the line.

  ‘Oh, just again – the sun was a bit weird on your face.’

  The test pilot leaned over and whispered gently in my ear, ‘Don’t hold it at 60 for too long, old boy. The laws of physics still apply.’

  Later, in the USA, I was due to fly the Boeing 727. The aircraft was an empty freighter. The director of the film was very clear: ‘Now, listen. You’re not insured to take off and land.’

  ‘Okay.’

  The captain jumped in the seat, and there was a flight engineer on board, which was a first. We started the engines and taxied into position on the runway, deserted in the middle of the Everglades.

  ‘You’re a 757 guy, huh?’ the captain asked.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Helluva plane. Used to fly them myself.’ He thought for a moment and then said, ‘Standard Boeing calls and procedures – you have control.’

  To my surprise, a hairy hand grasped the three thrust levers and pushed them forward to set take-off thrust. It was the flight engineer – and it was his job. The plane started to move; my hands were on the control column, feet on the rudder pedals.

  ‘What are you doing?’ squealed the director.

  ‘Taking off.’

  ‘But you’re not insured,’ he panted.

  ‘No, but I am,’ grinned the captain as I pulled back on the controls and the sublime Boeing creation elegantly streaked into the warm Florida air.

  Early 2005 saw the show air, and it was a great success, achieving surprisingly good ratings among female viewers, to the delight of the network.

  I did one more show for TV, although I was offered most of the series if I wanted. Sky were producing a series of shows entitled Inside . . . followed by the subject matter. One was Inside Wayne Rooney, for example. The producer had commissioned Flying Heavy Metal and had moved on from the Discovery Channel. We had lunch and discussed my involvement, all of which made me feel terribly grown up.

  ‘I don’t really have the time. I know how long these things take. Look, what’s the most potty one you have?’ I asked.

  ‘Inside Spontaneous Human Combustion.’

  ‘Brilliant. Completely bonkers. Can I do just that one?’

  Documentaries are fun because they turn knowledge into entertainment, but I have turned down over 20 series since. I simply don’t have the time.
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br />   What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

  Summer of 2005 was a US tour followed by a brief festival tour of Europe. It was about seven weeks long in total, and afterwards the writing urge was stronger than ever. Steve and I were starting to converge, and I began to get the same sort of goosebumps I’d had before the Seventh Son album. If we just took our time on this occasion and didn’t do everything in an unholy rush, the next album felt good.

  We allowed ourselves plenty of time, and therefore used hardly any of it. In fact, it was difficult to keep up with the number of ideas coming thick and fast. The album was on the verge of becoming a double, but we held ourselves in check, lest we bit off a bit more than the audience could swallow.

  It was clear that there was a theme running through the album. I had reprised a song from Skunkworks, ‘Strange Death in Paradise’, and repurposed the idea for Maiden with ‘Brighter than a Thousand Suns’. The song was about the atom bomb and, of course, we were all children of the Cold War. The themes of war and conflict were plentiful on the record. I suggested the title A Matter of Life and Death, after the classic Powell and Pressburger epic, which is one of my all-time favourite films.

  The title had the advantage of being not exclusively about war; it is, in fact, a love story, where love redeems all. It therefore could cover a multitude of song topics without being specific to any of them. It was, in a word, enigmatic.

  The cover was anything but: skeletal-zombie mercenaries riding shotgun on a militarised-Eddie-stencilled main battle tank. We met with Rod.

  ‘We want a tank on stage, and a fucking big gun.’

  This was Boy’s Own adventure stuff. Nuance went out the window. This was the apocalypse, end of story. We recorded in SARM in Notting Hill again, and took no prisoners. Large chunks of the album are first takes. When we listened back to it, we decided to play the whole thing live.