“Five Miles Out” by Mike Oldfield

"Five Miles Out" is the title track of Mike Oldfield's 1982 album and a Virgin single that year, a white-knuckle flight set to music. Oldfield had been a passenger on a small plane that an inexperienced pilot flew straight into a violent storm, and after earning his own pilot's licence he turned the scare into a drama of cockpit and control tower: the exchanges between a pilot in trouble and a traffic controller, thick with aviation jargon, come through a vocoder like voices over the radio, while Maggie Reilly's lead vocal answers bare and lyrical, offering comfort.

It crams a complicated structure into a short running time and borrows motifs from Tubular Bells and from "Taurus II" on the same album. Oldfield wrote it and produced and engineered it with Tom Newman, with Graham Broad guesting on drums.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.