Andy, the Paramotor, the Halo and the Number Plate

One of the favourite hobbies of my husband, Andy, is to go flying with his paramotor. A paramotor is like a paraglider with an engine. In other words, he doesn't have to leap off a cliff in order to fly; he can take off from the ground.

Andy doesn’t normally fly above clouds because it’s really cold up there and you aren’t allowed to go through them if you’re on visual flight rules, which paramotors and most small aircraft are. However, you are allowed to go through the gaps between the clouds, if they’re big enough . The clouds are at about 2,500 to 4000ft (altitudes are in ft, distances are in metres).

Andy has only flown above the clouds three times in his 12 years of flying. Last year, he was flying and for absolutely no good reason at all, went above the clouds (through sufficiently large gaps). He looked down on the cloud and saw the most amazing halo. A halo is a fully circular rainbow on a cloud. They are very rare and usually never seen. They arise due to a specific combination of: the angle of the sun and lighting conditions, the position of the pilot, the shape of the cloud – how round it is and whether the round bit is at the right angle towards you, and the density of the cloud. Andy photographed it and shared it with the other pilots. There were astounded and asked him how he’d managed to get such a shot.

We’d been getting a lot of activity from Tomson around the time of what would have been his 29th birthday. Andy was again paramotoring near Buckingham on 14 June, 2026 (Tomson’s birthday was on the 11 June). He flew to Silverstone Race Circuit and on the way back and again, for absolutely no sensible reason whatsoever, decided to go above the clouds. He didn’t even have his heated gloves with him! As he went up through a gap in the clouds, about half way up he realised he wasn’t going to make it before the cloud covered him, and within seconds he was inside the cloud. He couldn’t see anything and he was scared. He thought for a few seconds, should I go down or up? He decided to go up. After a couple of minutes he emerged above the cloud, and as he gained a little height, he saw a halo in front of him and he was flying towards it. He was shocked, so he got his camera out and started photographing. Whilst photographing it, he noticed his entire shadow was within the halo so he started to video it. Astonishingly, his shadow stayed completely within the halo while he was flying towards it.

Andy’s engineering head said that this combination of events was impossible, especially the fact that his shadow stayed within the halo as he was flying towards it. Last year he’d gone above the clouds because he was really upset, thinking about Tomson. He doesn’t know why he went above the clouds, but he suspects it was a thought drop from Tomson.

This year, Andy was feeling sad because as he saw Silverstone Circuit, with the cars racing below him, he realised he would never be able to take Tomson to see the racing at Silverstone as he had done with our eldest son Sam. At that precise moment, Andy felt the electromagnetic energy from Tomson to the left of his crown, and he knew that Tomson was with him.  He again doesn’t really know why he went higher through the clouds, it was a subsconscious action. What Andy hadn’t realised while he was going through the clouds, is that he had rotated through 180 degrees and was pointing back towards Silverstone. The reason he didn’t notice this was that his navigation flight app had crashed, so it appeared like he was continuing in a straight line. It has never crashed before. It was only when he stopped filming, realised the app had crashed and rebooted it on his phone, that he found out he was going in the wrong direction.

PS: There is an addition to this story. The following week, on Friday 19 June, Andy was heading off to another Paramotor event, called Blue Mill Fly-in, which is near Hull. On his drive down he asked Tomson if he would be with him in the air with him again. With amazing timing, a car pulled in front of him with the number plate BO07 SKY. Readers of my book will know that our nickname for Tomson was “Boo”.

Unfortunately, Andy couldn’t get a photo of the numberplate because he was driving at the time.