Bruce Dickinson Saves 400 People…
Hello, my name is Captain Bruce Dickinson. I’ll be saving your stranded ass today. Welcome aboard.
..because Bruce Dickinson can fly! Seriously, Bruce can fly. When times got a little tough for Iron Maiden, Dickinson decided he wanted to learn how to fly commercial airplanes. Which was good for the over 400 British travelers left stranded in Egypt and Greece this last week following the sudden demise of the UK’s third largest tour company, XL.
Dickinson has been flying Maiden to gigs all over the world for over a decade in his Cessna 421 and Ed Force One, the bands own Boeing 747. For the last couple of years, Dickinson has been an employee of Crawley based Astraeus Airlines. Dickinson said the biggest sacrifice he made in becoming a pilot was cutting off his waist-long hair. When asked why he volunteered to help his stranded fellow country-men and women, Dickinson had this to say:
“I was just doing my job. I was called out like a lot of other pilots to help and I was obviously happy to do that. Some of the people on the flight were obviously frustrated by the situation they had found themselves in but everyone was pretty good-natured about it all.”
Chemical Wedding Trailer, May, 2008.
In his spare time, when he’s not busy saving people, fencing, or belting out Maiden classics for 50,000 people on a Friday night, Dickinson somehow found the time to write a screenplay called Chemical Wedding, a fictional account of the reincarnation of Aleister Crowley. The film showed at Cannes this past May. Dickinson flew the rest of Maiden and some lucky British rock journalists to France for a screening of Chemical Wedding in, Ed Force One.
