Are you sure you were cleared for take-off to begin with?
The people in the watchtower might be very pissed at you for taking off unannounced, and dont even try to make a flyby passed the tower, someone might spill their coffee!!
Reminds me of an old trick you could do before they made "T" take you to the revival terminal. "T" used to force a rapid (ie: so quick, you seemed to TP) movement of the avatar to get them unstuck from objects. Well, near the southern tip of the continent (S of the robots) were all sorts of jagged terrain, including one place where you could wedge yourself in a "V" shaped hole. Get in, get yourself good and wedged, look north, press "T" and wait for blastoff. You would fly so high that the top half of the screen would turn black, your draw distance would cap off, and you would fly so far that it was about a 10 minute run back at the OLD RUN SPEED (about as fast as someone now with a good bit of quickness). Skyrider, Lady Draconis, and I would take groups of noobs down there and teach them to fly and have group catapulting sessions in which we would see how many people we could fit in the hole and launch at once. I think we launched 8 people at once and ended up landing in a scattered pattern that was so spread out that it took a couple minutes to gather everyone back in one group.
Ahhh... good times... now I need to go home and fly in VU 10