Five days before the test, and for the first time in 62 flights a different type: D-EUTC, a Cessna 172S. Saturday morning, 08:34, 123 km out to Lake Neusiedl, 41 minutes.

Going from the Aquila to the C172 is a change of philosophy. The Aquila is a modern composite aeroplane, light, smooth, with crisp controls. The 172 is a high-wing machine made of sheet metal, heavier, more sluggish, imperturbable, and you look out through the struts instead of over the nose. Both of them fly. They just feel completely different.

97 knots average shows that the 172 keeps up well in the cruise. What it cannot do is climb as easily.

27 November, block off 13:07, OE-AKW. In the crew field: Siess / H. Role: PIC. This is the practical test.

245 km, 87 minutes, 5,089 ft, three landings, out into the Bucklige Welt and back. Everything practised over eight months in a single flight: navigation by chart, diverting from the plan, exercises at altitude, emergency procedures, circuits, landings — and all the while an examiner in the right-hand seat, taking notes.

The Bucklige Welt at the end of November: brown meadows, bare rows of trees, fog in the hollows, and in the west the first snow-covered summits. A very Austrian backdrop for the most important afternoon of the training.

Block on at 14:52. 266 days after the introductory flight, 64 flights, 155 landings. From here on the logbook no longer says student.

29 December, 08:48. 198 km, 62 minutes, alone, across Lake Neusiedl, past Vienna and over the Vienna Woods. The first flight after the test that nobody had to approve.

Winter flying in eastern Austria is a lottery: either a layer of low stratus sits over the Vienna Basin until midday, or it is the clearest day of the year. A departure just before nine on 29 December, at 103 knots average and without detours, points clearly to the latter.

Cold air is dense air. In winter the Aquila climbs as though it were a different aeroplane.

The first flight abroad: Bad Vöslau — Fertőszentmiklós, south of Lake Neusiedl in Hungary. 155 km, 54 minutes, five landings, in OE-DCL — the second Cessna in the book, again with P. in the right-hand seat.

The way there leads across Lake Neusiedl, past Sopron, into the Hungarian plain. From above, the border is invisible and yet completely obvious: the fields get bigger, the roads straighter, the villages laid out differently. Lake Fertő — the Hungarian half of Lake Neusiedl — turns into an enormous bed of reeds.

Five landings on a flight abroad means there was practice there too. An unfamiliar airfield, an unfamiliar language on the radio, and circuits on top of it.

88 km back, 36 minutes, 2,374 ft. Home over Sopron and Lake Neusiedl.

A January flight stays low — 2,374 ft is the second-lowest maximum altitude of any cross-country flight in the book. In winter you fly below the cloud base, not above it.