In any aircraft you fly, you always think about what can go wrong, and you plan for it in advance. You always have back-up plans.

I was brought up in the north of Scotland, and where I lived was so lowly populated, it was used as a low-flying area by the Air Force, so lots of exciting aircraft used to fly over my village.

From a very early age, I wanted to fly aeroplanes.

Life is about making plans from which you deviate, almost always. If you are lucky, you do come up with a plan.

We go up just into space - space is most commonly accepted to be 100 kilometres above the earth's surface, and we go up just beyond that to about 350,000 ft.

I've been lucky enough to have flown some very interesting aircraft in the past, but SpaceShipTwo is far and away the most exciting of them all.