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Flying An Airplane: Better Than Most Things

First: Instructor Dave. This guy is living the effing dream. In 2004, he was managing a “popular coffee shop” somewhere around Baltimore. He came across a budget book on flight instruction, got hooked, took out a (large) line of credit on his house...

Motherboard deputy editor Sean Yeaton flew to Texas yesterday for a little get together and, on the way out, posted a quick note on Facebook about hating airplanes. Which reminded me that airplanes are actually extremely awesome, and flying them — actually controlling them with your hands and feet — is better than most other things. (By the by, if the recent human ability to travel across North America in an afternoon doesn’t count as a “singularity,” we need to reconsider.) It sucks you pretty much have to be rich to fly a plane, but I got a free lesson way back in the early-days of Motherboard and wrote a thing on the supreme pleasures of floating in the sky.

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First: Instructor Dave. This guy is living the effing dream. In 2004, he was managing a "popular coffee shop" somewhere around Baltimore. He came across a budget book on flight instruction, got hooked, took out a (large) line of credit on his house, and went all-in for the cause: getting his commercial pilot’s license, whatever you need to teach flying, snagging a full-time instruction gig, and here he is, buzzing around the Chesapeake Bay for a living. He did the damn thing.

So, I’m at the office of Phoenix Aviation for, like, five minutes before Instructor Dave and I are driving out on the tarmac toward the small airplane hangers (though at Martin State, it’s pretty much all small planes except alien spaceship looking planes from the Maryland Air National Guard base across the way zipping around and landing like they’re trying to land balanced perfectly on the tip of one wing). And our plane is small, like pack-up-in-a-suitcase small. Not really, but Dave by himself was able to pull the thing out of the hanger by hand pretty easy. Daresay, but looking back, there’s even something toy-like about it.

Anyhow, we go around poking at things, looking at nuts, and sticking fingers in fuel tanks for a little while and I manage to squirt airplane fuel all over my hand and arm while trying to wiggle this little tester tube into a little fuel port to test that the gas doesn’t have dirt or water in it. It doesn’t.

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While we’re at it, I make my first connection between people that have airplanes and people that have large boats as I eye a small cluster of white-hair Republican-looking fellows standing around a bigger, nicer looking airplane a few hangers down. There’s no clubhouse or fancy bar at Martin State, but I imagine wherever they’re flying on the Eastern Shore can probably provide. Not to rag on people that own airplanes, but you have to consider that they own one and I don’t. .

All of the checklisting stuff is just making me really antsy. Maybe it didn’t even take that long, but between the before-moving-plane, before-turning-on-plane, after-turning-on-plane, before-taking-off-in-plane checklists—which are all reassuring, yes—I just want to be flying the plane. At the same time, that makes every little step closer to flying the plane really exciting, like getting in the plane, putting on the headsets, starting the engine, taxi-ing to the runway. All delicious appetizers. Meanwhile, I’m starting to freak out that it’s going to get foggy or start to storm because it sure looks like it.

I could do this for a living I think.

Before we take off, an aside by way of a confession: at some point between my thrice yearly trips back and forth between Michigan and Colorado as a little kid/unaccompanied minor bouncing between parents, and my thrice yearly trips to this or that music festival or conference or whatever, I turned chicken on airplanes. An aging symptom, perhaps. These days, I add in 20 or so bucks per flight for booze, don’t schedule flight legs longer than three hours, and still have a hard time peeing in a plane bathroom. So, there you go.

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A weird thing though: my fear drops considerably the smaller the plane gets. I’d take a thunderstorm in a Bombardier Q200 over a 777 any day of the week. The difference? I can see and feel it, the science behind flight working right under my feet, out the window, in the sloppily whirring props. It makes sense. Buoyancy, friends. An airplane ain’t nothin’ but a funny looking boat.

So, on a scale of irrational fear, this is nothing compared to standing in an airport terminal waiting for my row to be called.

Landing is maybe the most fun.

I should talk briefly about the inside of the plane. You hear about how big jets have all of this ridiculous equipment like backups of backups and autopilots and supercomputers and radars and of this kinda stuff. And how a big jet can basically fly itself, an idea which the Ask the Pilot fellow hates. But the little Cessna is like the inside of my old Volkswagen Beetle, but a little smaller, with lots of controls that are activated by pushing and pulling and twisting, and there’s a heater in there that you just know doesn’t work well. Even the windows are like those forward triangle windows on my old car that have a hinge and a latch. The weird thing: this is all really calming. I could fix anything on that car.

And then Dave is like, "OK, push in the throttle all the way and when we get to 55 (85?) knots, pull back gently on the yolk." The throttle is actually a rod with a knob at the end of it, not like the big handle in jets, which is odd. We buzz on down the runway, which at over a mile long is kinda comical in scale to our plane, and it’s like I don’t even need to pull back. We hit that speed and the thing just wants to lift off on its own. Like, a certain very special moment everything gets really light and that moment where the plane lifts off isn’t strange or weird or unnatural. Suddenly the world is all very soft. That’s all.

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And, OK, receding fast. Instructor Dave has the controls again and we’re bouncing and swaying up above Eastern Avenue and some trees and at 1,000 feet Dave explains that we’re turning to make a rectangle around the airport, so we can climb higher. Then, like, nothing, we’re at 1,500 feet above the Chesapeake Bay still bouncing around a little and every now and then a little gust a wind will knock us a little off axis and Instructor Dave will correct it like he’s taking highway curves in a car.

Taken out an open window.

About halfway across the Bay, gray and drab under low clouds like railway iron, I get the controls again and Dave shows has me make some little turns, and go up and down. When we reach the other shore, he explains one of the few advantages of these little tiny planes over big gets: they can glide far. "See, I’m looking at all those farms down there as good places to land," Dave explains. Then, he pulls the throttle all the way out (turning off the engine), and we’re just hanging there, rolling slowly downward in the wind at 80 or so miles-per-hour.

Dave lives the dream. The bummer of all of this is that an hour of flight instruction goes for around $150, and the time it takes to get an actual license adds up to about $10,000. Of course, back home I’m frantically looking at the realities of getting a pilot’s license and living the effing dream, but I don’t have a house to mortgage and can’t even afford a car. I grill Instructor Dave about this for a while after we land, and I can tell it’s making him uncomfortable—or maybe I’m just making him uncomfortable, because I do that to people. Anyhow, the moral of all of this is that flying is one of the most fun things there is and, if I ever come into some scrill, I’m gone—for an hour a week, anyhow.

This post originally appeared on Motherboard in May 14, 2010.

Special thanks to Dave Stewart, the owners of Phoenix Aviation in Baltimore, Charles and Carol Schaefer, and letsgoflying.com.