[A note: I'm busy today and don't have any quick-and-dirty posting ideas. Instead, I'll take you back to a post I wrote last year when I was doing more flying. Forgive me for taking the cheap way out, but even a year or so later it sums up my feelings about flying better than anything I could have written since.]
Many times I've tried and failed to describe what flying means, but it's one of those things that you can't really explain, at least in words. It's something you have to experience, and something that you really have to share with someone else who knows the feeling. Too many times when I try to explain what flying means to me (or what Alaska means to me), I feel like I'm an astronaut who's just come back from six months on the International Space Station. I've spent half a year participating in one of the most magnificent adventures anyone can have. And yet most of the people who would talk to me about it would nod politely at my explanations of doing gymnastics in perpetual freefall and of looking down on our beautiful planet and seeing no borders, and say "Gosh, that's nice, but how did you go to the bathroom up there?" or "Well, didn't you get homesick?" or (worst of all) "Gosh, you know, I could never do that kind of thing." (Ooooh, spare me.)
The first thing I have to do is differentiate flying of the sort I'm doing now from the sort of flying you do in the cabin of an airliner. Strapped into an airliner, you're disconnected from the process, and you might as well be in a car or a bus going somewhere. Sure, you have plenty of time to think and contemplate, and to look down on the little towns and cities, but it's not the same.
To some extent, I'd even say the same about if you were in the front of the airplane. Yeah, it's cool to be an airline pilot, but when you boil it down, it's not really that different from your average office desk job. Sure, the office has a great view and travels fast, but so much of what you do is systems management and customer service. The airplane is computerized and can mostly fly itself. It's a far cry from where you start out, in an airplane where almost everything is manual in some way, shape or form, where there are no fancy multi-function computerized displays or anything of the sort.
And flying's different in so many ways from other experiences. I love cars, and there's a thrill I get from driving a fine automobile in a way that you drive fine automobiles. Heck, there are even times when I enjoy taking my little Chevrolet out on a back road and pretending I'm Liz Halliday, taking the corners and seeing if I can improve my lap time. But it's not the same. I don't attach the same feeling to driving a car that I do with flying, and I don't know why that is. Driving a fine automobile doesn't take you into another realm the way flying an airplane does.
Flying, to me, is about so much and yet about so little. Obviously, it's about the realization of a lifelong dream, and yet the little things I've seen have been the ones that have stuck with me. The little victories, like finally learning how to deflect aileron and coordinate rudder on a crosswind takeoff. Or the little epiphanies, when you discover why things act the way they do and experience that simple little pleasure of finding things out (thanks, Dr. Feynman).
And then there are those moments that you see something that leaves you in awe, and you don't know why. I've seen a lot of storm clouds in my lifetime, having grown up in the South. But last week, up in the pattern, I happened to look out the top of the windscreen, and up a few thousand feet above us was this big, gray, puffy cloud. Intellectually I knew we were well below it, but from my viewpoint a thousand or so feet above ground, I almost felt I could reach up and touch it. It was almost one of those moments where you're speechless. There have been a dozen or so moments when, even in the midst of some demanding training, I've seen things that cried out for a lyricist's view. John Gillespie Magee's poem "High Flight" has become a cliche many times over, but even as shopworn as it's become, there is so much truth in it, and I never realized that until I became a pilot -- that he'd really nailed something about the experience.
Flying is a very high-sensory experience for me, and it means something deep within. It makes me feel things I can't express, almost the same way that a song can put pictures in my head or make me feel things that I can't (or, in some highly special and very personal cases, don't want to) explain to other folks. And, like a song, each person who hears it or does it has his or her own mental image that goes with it. Flying, for me, is this lyrical experience with so many deep, hidden meanings that I can't explain, any more than I can explain why a certain song makes me think of certain things or certain places or certain people. It just does. I hope it never stops being that way for me.
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