Flying Over The Australian Wheatbelt.

Yesterday my adoptive younger brother took me flying. He's my brother's best friend, he spent most of his evenings and weekends at our house, and at the tender age of 18, he's currently training to be a commercial pilot. Luckily for me, he's allowed to take passengers on his training flights. I got the boring one - the Western Australian Wheatbelt, however I personally found it really exciting; I've never been in such a small plane before and it was really cool seeing this kid I've known since he was 12 fly an airplane! Not to mention it was awesome seeing the landscape from above, and flying over the Darling Ranges was just wonderful.

While Ben checked the plane and did all of his 'pre-flight' stuff, I sat there totally shocked at the huge array of instruments in front of us, thinking 'is he actually going to fly us safely, or are we gonna die!?'. Let's just say I could never ever be a pilot, they must have amazing memories to remember all that stuff. He took me through the safety things, then told me to put my headphones on, otherwise 'you'll be deafened' :O I didn't need to be told twice (you can see a selfie of these a little further down).

And before I knew it, we were suddenly down the runway and up in the sky! I could see the city in the distance and the Darling Ranges ahead of me. The time passed so quickly I was shocked how long we were up in the air for (around 3 hours), the plane had really big windows so you could see everything around you which made the time pass super quickly. Also it was awesome hearing the conversations going on between air traffic control over the radio!

My favourite part was flying over the small country town of York. It's one of my favourite towns, it's really cute and colonial, with a lot of the original buildings and some really interesting antique shops. There's also a really nice picnic spot by the river.

After York we flew back over the Darling Ranges towards Perth, flying over Mundaring and the Weir on our way. 

Naturally I had to get a selfie. Please excuse the no-makeup look, all the freckles on my face have come out and I'm kinda loving it! Attractive headphones, huh.

We hit some turbulence at one point, which is really scary in such a small plane, it literally feels like the whole plane is just gonna flip over. Luckily Ben got us through it and we made it back to Perth with beautiful views of the city on our way in.

We landed safely and I got out of the plane very impressed at Ben's flying! Now I just need to persuade the fam to come back over here so they can have a go too ;)