Learn to fly a 737 in an hour

 have two recurring nightmares. The first is that I’m five years old and dad is picking me up from school. To get to the car (a 1976 Datsun Cherry), we have to cross the sort of rickety bridge you really wouldn’t have at the end of a school driveway, even in the days before health and safety.

Predictably (because it’s recurring), I fall through a hole in the bridge and vanish down into a bottomless pit. Or at least it might be bottomless. I always wake up before I hit the bottom.

The second is that I’m on a plane in a storm and both pilots have a heart attack (what are the chances?). A gorgeous stewardess (what are the chances?) rushes through the cabin asking if anyone knows how to fly a 737 and, before I can stop myself, my hand shoots up.

Why I do this is unclear — perhaps it’s because she’s Swedish — but the next thing that happens is that I’m sitting in the cockpit. At the exact moment the Swedish hostess (sitting on my lap for encouragement) realises I have grossly exaggerated my flying abilities, we crash into the side of a mountain. I wake up. Usually screaming.

Well, now I’m cured. Not of the falling-through-the-bridge one. That will take years more therapy. No, the second one, because last week I learnt how to fly a 737. You might think that training members of the public to fly jumbos would have been banned since 9/11. Not so. You can now pitch up at the state-of-the-art British Airways training facility at Heathrow (with at least £400 in your pocket) and take the controls of a Boeing.

Okay, okay, not an actual Boeing. That would be foolhardy. But the simulator cockpit is identical to the real thing in almost every way. It has all the same (hundreds of) buttons, levers, switches and pedals. The only differences are that you look out on computer-generated landscapes rather than real planet, and that if you crash, it doesn’t hurt.

Each of the 14 simulators at Heathrow cost £10m, and they’re so accurate that they are zero flight-time rated. This means that a pilot can do all his or her training on one of these. The first time they take the controls of a real plane will be when they have lots of passengers in the back. If you’re worried by that, you needn’t be. These machines are incredible.

It took about two minutes for me to forget that I was in a large white box attached to the ground. In that two minutes, I met my instructor, First Officer Gemma Dixon, I adjusted my seat and I made a silly joke about where the machinegun joystick was.

Gemma then began to explain what all the buttons did. There was no machinegun, which is quite spoilsportish given that this is really a giant computer game, but there are an awful lot of other things.

Radio comms, pedals for steering and braking on the ground, a whole wheel for steering in the air, levers for flaps, something called “trim”, a Teasmade, a suitably throbbing thrust lever. It’s all there, just like you used to get when you boarded a flight before the days of locked, bulletproof doors and sky cops.

You have only an hour, so my here’s-how-to-fly-a-737 tutorial was extremely quick. After Gemma pointed out the 19th complicated thingy in so many seconds, I’m afraid I stopped taking it in, which is a shame, because a minute later we were off.

Pilots hate these simulators because they have to spend two days in them every six months, passing stringent tests to prove they are still capable of not crashing into a mountain. For them, it’s triple maths or A-level Latin. For me, it was pure fun, at first. In your head, as you set off down the runway, you’re thinking: “I’m flying a plane — cool.” But as the speed and engine noise pick up, you think: “I’m flying a plane — s***.”

You have to put through enough thrust to reach a certain speed before you can take off. I know you know this — it’s obvious — but actually doing it is quite a thing.

The pedals you steer with are quite sensitive and it’s hard to concentrate on them while you’re also mucking about with the accelerator. I tried to edge us a tiny bit right and we veered terrifyingly to the right. I moved to correct it with the left pedal and we lurched left.

As the speed increased, the zigzagging became more pronounced. My 128 imaginary passengers would definitely have been screaming by now. One or two might have sustained neck injuries. Just at the point where things were looking really grim and my brain was telling me “We’re all going to die”, Gemma stepped in, literally. She steadied the pedals (both pilots have identical controls) and we were away.

Any male passenger who has ever rolled his eyes at the prospect of a female pilot (“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Pamela and I’ll be your captain today”) should unroll them. Flying these things is like a complicated version of rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time. It involves fiendish multitasking. Female pilots are clearly preferable.

Thanks to Pamela, sorry, Gemma, we were airborne and, I’ll be honest, I was sweating. Every muscle in my hands and arms was straining to keep the plane on an even keel. Gemma plugged in some co-ordinates for our short jaunt over central London (is that wise?) and before I had the chance to relax and take a captain’s-eye view over the scenery, we were banking around Windsor Castle. The graphics of the landscape are pretty basic, but the juddering movements of the simulator make it incredibly realistic. The beeping doesn’t help. Always with the beeping.

“What’s that beeping?” I asked.

“You’re turning quite sharply,” said Gemma, ever calm, even though the virtual trolley and accompanying stewardess (the one who sits on my lap in my nightmare) would now be spattered across the virtual cabin. By the time we’d ticked off Canary Wharf and made it back west, I was exhausted and half my passengers were dead.

The landing was not my finest hour, either. I got the glide slope wrong. The runway showed four reds rather than two reds and two whites, which meant I was too low. So I pulled up and got four whites. Dipped down, four reds. Pulled up again, trimming a few hedges in the process, and flopped the aircraft down on Runway 29-er (or whatever it was called). Gemma, still diplomatic in the face of idiocy, said it was “within tolerance”. Meaning that the aircraft wouldn’t have disintegrated on impact, but that I would almost certainly have had to fill out quite an extensive incident report. Still, we’d made it. I was Dean Martin at the end of Airport, hugging the hostie. I was Chesley Sullenberger in the Hudson, about to walk the cabin twice and then tell everyone about it.

I didn’t get any formal confirmation from British Airways to say that in the event of a double pilot heart attack, I would be qualified to step in and save the day, with or without a hostess on my lap, but that’s probably a good thing. My wife might get jealous.

- One-hour flights cost £399 in the 737-400 simulator. If you’re flash, the 747s and 777s cost £449. Three-hour flights are also available, but surely one hour is exhausting enough. Call 020 8513 3472 or visit ebaft.com