He’s perhaps the best bush pilot in Africa, the one who teaches the other fliers – and the occasional writer – how it’s done. But when he has a midlife crisis, it’s a doozy.

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Then, three days ago — 24 hours before my arrival — Pocock’s girlfriend of a decade announced she was ending their two-year engagement, packed up her belongings and moved out of the Bush Air compound.

Pocock disclosed this fact not long after he picked me up in his beloved Cessna 172 from the nearest large airport, in the town of Nelspruit. Initially, he did a good job of maintaining his game face, but as the weather darkened, so did his mood. Evidently, too, there are guns on the premises. (He’s admitted that sometimes he gets angry and shoots at the unfortunate snakes that make their way into the house.)

I’ve been planning this trip for weeks, I’ve traveled 15 hours and 8,000 miles to be here, and yet I can’t help but think: Maybe we should reschedule?

“No, no,” Pocock says, with a quick shake of his head. “We’ve just got to make it work.” And so he raises his eyebrows, grins thinly and takes another swig of his Scotch. There are stories about CC Pocock.

In African aviation circles, he has a dual reputation: madman on the one hand, and expert aviator with a mysterious past on the other. Pocock particularly likes flying low, for instance, over the Crocodile River, which borders Kruger National Park. On one recent excursion, he says, “I was trying to hit the crocs on the head with my wheels.” On another occasion, he was invited to meet a friend at a pub some miles east of his house. “I said, ‘That’s too far to drive. I’ll fly.’”

He set the plane down in a clearing next to the pub. Another time, flying through thunderstorms over mountains in Swaziland as the sun was setting, low on fuel, “I had to piss really bad, so I decided I had to land,” Pocock recalls. He dived under the clouds, sighted a road, made sure he could see only red taillights and came zooming down onto the pavement. Road signs nearby pointed the way into town, and still in search of fuel and a loo, he attempted to taxi toward civilization — until the road became too narrow for his wingspan.

South Africa’s Civil Aviation Authority, which has suspended his license several times, is not amused by these tales, but to Captain Crash, such derring-do serves a purpose. “Take a chance — otherwise, you never learn,” he likes to say. At 48, he has acquired more than 5,000 hours of flight time (though he has probably flown many more, he says, not being very meticulous with his logbook), and he long ago lost track of the number of accidents and close calls he’s had.

On each side of his 172 — a tricked-out, army-green machine whose airframe was built in 1961 — is the stencil of a crucifix, and underneath that, John 3:16, the most pertinent phrase of which might be: Shall Not Perish. In the cockpit, he sits close to the yoke like a race-car driver (which he once was), his wizened-punk-outbacker’s frame fitting the space like a glove.

It’s now the morning after his dark hour, and with his focus on the task at hand, he has brightened a bit. After a routine jaunt around the local patch, spinning the trim tab’s wheel all the while, he puts the nose down and dives full-bore toward the Bush Air runway like a strafer coming in for a run, 200 miles an hour, engine roaring. We buzz the field, and the tires nearly graze the grass.

The grass ends, the property ends, the land drops away into a rocky gorge and we break hard to the left, the G-forces heaving up toward three, squeezing my torso and causing me to whoop like a warrior — a 60-degree bank, the left wing pointed at the ground — and Pocock circles the plane around, back in the direction from which we’d come, turning hard and descending fast. At 180 miles an hour we swoop down on the deck, still banking tightly as the plane rotates in the direction of the strip. We’re flying so close to the trees now that Pocock — hard as it is to believe — waggles the wings in order to miss one.

This will be no long, linear final approach. We come careering out of the turn — fast, flat and oblique — and all of a sudden we’re over the runway, and almost simultaneously Pocock kills the power, retracts the flaps, pulls the yoke and drops the plane in, his feet stomping the brakes all the way to the floor. Within the length of a soccer pitch we’re at a dead stop. He taxis back to the hangar, and over the intercom his voice crackles. “We don’t mess around in this part of the world . . . we fly!”

Later, he explains that this particular maneuver, in addition to being fun, has a real-world application: If animals have converged on a landing area, you buzz the field, scare them away, and then set the plane down as fast as possible before the herds can return.

“By the time you see the wires, it’ll be too late to pull up . . . especially if you’re going at high speed. you fly under — and you live to talk about it.”

“Most people think that bush flying is cowboy stuff — but really, it’s safe,” Pocock says. “These are the techniques that make you a safer pilot.”

One of the weekend’s students, Dean Stander, a barrel-chested Boer with ambitions of becoming a professional bush flier, now takes the left seat, and off we go for another round. “If you’re coming in at 65 knots, it’s too fast. You don’t fly on indicated airspeed,” Pocock says of the short-field velocity advised by virtually every other flight school in the world, not to mention the Cessna 172’s own handbook. The ideal speed, then? Forty knots, give or take, Pocock insists — right at the stall speed.

“I think they must put in a big safety margin,” Stander muses. “I don’t think they put in a big safety margin so much as they just don’t know how to fly the airplane.” Pocock also covers low-level, on-the-deck flying with Stander, including what to do if power lines suddenly appear in front of you. One of Pocock’s precepts is that, counterintuitively, you are to go underneath them, and so we do, diving and skimming along as the African hedge flashes four meters beneath us, missing by a comfortable margin the wires stretching ahead.

“By the time you see the wires, it’ll be too late to pull up, especially if you’re going at high speed. You fly under — and you live to talk about it. Birds: When they’re coming straight at you, they always dive. Except the odd one, who just doesn’t get it right.”

Pocock also shows Stander how to follow roads and riverbeds at extremely low altitudes, steering with the rudder. I’m still in the back seat, and we are so close to the ground it’s as if we’re we driving. (Later, Pocock explains that if he gets momentarily lost for whatever reason while flying, he’ll often dive down and have a look at the road signs.)

At one point during the day’s session Pocock tells Stander, “By the end of the course, if you’re not already an alcoholic, you will be.” Pocock is a little vague on how he came to master his field, other than to use the phrase trial and error.

Born and raised in Cape Town, he wanted to be a pilot from an early age, but couldn’t scrounge together enough money for lessons until 1986, when he was 26. In the meantime, he dropped out of high school (“They couldn’t teach me anything I wanted to know”), briefly entered the South African army (“That didn’t work out either, because I don’t like authority; I was always in the s---”), pursued a career as a professional race-car driver (“I was getting there, but it was costing me so much money I decided to stuff it”), moved to Johannesburg to become a nightclub DJ (“In those days, Joburg was the place to be; it was like Hollywood”) and taught himself enough about fireworks, pyrotechnics and laser light shows to start his own business (“Eventually you just learn, and if you’ve got all your fingers at the end of the day, you’re a professional”).

Though piloting started out as a hobby, from the beginning of his training Pocock knew what kind of flying he wanted to pursue. “Even before I had my license, I was buzzing the neighbors, landing on beaches,” he says.

“I wanted the extreme stuff.” He found it in and around Kissimmee, Florida, where he had moved in 1990 to earn his U.S. commercial pilot’s license. He subsidized his five years in the U.S. by “taking people for flips, in different kinds of conditions, mostly in the swamps, at low level.” There are rumors that he buzzed Epcot Center.

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