“Want me to fly her?” I asked. Leo and I both fell in love with flying and with helicopters fifteen years ago, when we were still in our teens, and we both held current licenses.

He shook his head. “No way. That’s my privilege as Big Brother.”

Leo was forty-three minutes older than me, and we never forgot it. Other people suffered some confusion when he referred to me as his “younger brother,” or I talked about his great age.

“All right, old man,” I said, and went to stow his bag in the rear. While Leo signed off for the ’copter, I climbed into the passenger seat and checked the weather report. It was nearly six-thirty, just getting dark, and there was cloud cover at three thousand feet. Not the most perfect conditions. Leo was shaking his head in annoyance when he finished with the paperwork and climbed aboard.

“Lots of traffic, I guess. Look at this lousy flight plan. We have to head way off to the west before they’ll let me swing up north.”

“What do you have as the Middlesbrough ETA?”

” Eight twenty-eight .”

“That’s not bad at all. I’ve done this before. You’ll find that everything clears up once we’re past Cambridge — it’s just this mess round London that’s a pain.”

He grunted, and settled in at the controls. Visibility was good in spite of the cloud overhead. I could see the dark flats of the Water Board reservoirs off to the southwest as we lifted, and away behind us the haze of London itself was a blue-grey ball over the city. We rose to two thousand feet and slid away to the west.

I hate to say it, but Leo was a better pilot than I was. That was a surprise to me, since on all the standard tests that we had been taking together since we were in our early teens, I scored higher on manual dexterity than he did.