When you’re a pilot, little is more satisfying than properly executing a precision instrument approach. It’s all about focus, situational awareness, and trusting your guidance systems instead of your middle ear when you can’t see where you’re going. You’re descending blindly through the clouds, making small course and altitude corrections to ensure you’re properly tracking the localizer and glideslope signals. Suddenly, the clouds begin to thin, abruptly give way, and there you are, right where you’re supposed to be: at the proper height a few hundred feet above the ground with the runway directly in front of you. Good stuff.
To me, though, what’s even more rewarding is flying in clear skies with unlimited visibility.
Gazing down from on high, I am ever reminded how staggeringly beautiful our planet is regardless of the many challenges it faces today, and how privileged I am to enjoy the view. On such days I think of Wilbur and Orville and the countless other aviation pioneers. I am grateful to them. Their pluck and ingenuity allows pilots like me today to “slip the surly bonds” and go dancing the skies “on laughter-silvered wings,” as Canadian pilot John Gillespie Magee, Jr. put it so eloquently in his famous poem, “High Flight.” On such glorious days, I cannot understand why anyone would not want to learn to fly.
Don’t get me wrong. The learning is not easy. There are abundant skills to master, medical examinations to take, operational manuals to study, much memorization, and tests to pass, both written and practical. It takes patience, money, and time. At first the goal and the hazards inherent in it seem overwhelming. Indeed, the first bit of advice my first instructor ever imparted on me, once we dispensed with all the niceties and climbed into N45290, a Cessna 150, for my first flight lesson, are burned into my brain like a cattle brand. “A plane will kill you faster than anything,” he said, “unless you know what you’re doing.” I remember thinking, This is nuts. No way I’ll ever be confident enough to ever safely fly this thing yourself. And then, on a warm August morning, with less than 12 hours of flight time recorded in my official pilot’s logbook—less time than it took to learn how to drive a car–my instructor told me to taxi in, climbed out, and said, “Three touch-and-goes, then come on back. Do not break the airplane or you’ll have to pay for it.”
My first solo flight!
The thing about it was, I don’t remember being nervous. What I do remember, vividly, is taxiing back out (it was a small airport in northern Colorado with no control tower) and having to wait while a coyote sat placidly about a hundred feet down the runway, blocking my takeoff. Eventually the coyote sauntered off and I advanced the throttle. As the airspeed needle came alive and the plane lifted off, climbing into the blue, I immediately heard a loud, disquieting noise—much like what I imagined a hurricane might sound like—and I realized I’d forgotten to latch the right-side door after my instructor got out. I leaned over while keeping the wings level, yanked the door shut, proceeded to perform my requisite touch-and-go’s, and landed, full-stop, to my instructor’s relief, without breaking the airplane.
To this day, it remains among the proudest moments of my life.
It’s especially difficult to write on VFR days, when toiling inside at a computer, trying to be creative, is not nearly as fun as taking off and burning holes in clear skies. As I write this, I’m working on my eighth Cordell Logan novel working title, The Impossible Turn), but I’d much rather be flying.