Becoming a civvy. Well, I’ll tell you what.

I left the RAF on £8,500 a year and took a job in West London on £13,500. On paper, that looked like a decent pay rise. Then I started looking for somewhere to live and quickly found out that £13.5k did not go very far at all.

To make matters worse, I got clobbered by emergency tax because, as usual, the RAF could not manage civil paperwork properly. I ended up renting a room in a house on the Britwell estate in Langley. Anyone who knows the area will know it was not exactly the most desirable place to land. Then there was the rail season ticket on top. By that point I was already drowning in debt and had not even bought any food yet.

For three months I was on emergency tax and lived on beans on toast the whole time.

On my first day working for the CAA, I met my boss for the first and only time. He told me I would be working on NAS Monitor with Martin Hutchings. The strange thing was that I had joined to work in Ross’s Flight Data Processing team, because that was the world I actually knew.

NAS Monitor was, and probably still is, the blackest of black arts. It was basically the operating system behind an air traffic control system. Completely the wrong place to put me, really. I was not much of an engineer in the true sense. I was an ATC man who understood operations.

Still, life throws things at you and sometimes you just have to get on with it.

Martin was a complete brain box, the absolute opposite of me in many ways, but I learned a huge amount from him and I learned it fast.

My writing was Martin’s first challenge. It simply was not accurate enough for engineering. He was very good at waving his red pen around, and plenty of what I produced came back covered in corrections. But I learned.

Bit by bit I became far more methodical. Learning how to write accurate tests properly did two things. First, it improved my writing. Second, it forced me to understand the system in real detail. Once you can describe exactly what a system should do, and exactly how it has gone wrong, you are already halfway to understanding it properly.

That, in turn, meant I could write PTRs, Program Trouble Reports, in proper detail. Within a year I had raised more PTRs than anyone else in the department.

The next problem was that working on NAS Monitor meant working on the live system. That, in turn, meant doing much of the work in the early hours of the morning, when there was the least operational risk.

Getting a train in for a 10pm start was bad enough. Getting one home at 3am was worse. In the end, on those nights, I would often just sleep in the office.

It was all slowly killing me, or at least that is what it felt like at the time. I was skint, exhausted, living badly, and working ridiculous hours. But there was an upside. Very quickly, I was becoming one of the very few real NAS experts in the world.

I had the perfect teacher and the hunger to learn.

After three years of doing that, I decided I was starting to get stale. I was no longer really learning anything new, and that is always a dangerous place to be. Once you stop learning, you are just repeating yourself.

At that point there was a new project in town, one that was going to replace the whole lot. That sounded exactly like the place I ought to be, so I volunteered to move across.

In 1994, I joined the new project.

Oh dear. What had I done?