The knack to flying, or, I ain’t gettin’ on no plane! Part the first.

One thing that’s amazed me about the Year of Fear project is the utter generosity and enthusiasm with which people have taken to it. I’ve had offers to help me tackle fears from friends who have volunteered heaps of time and endless patience, from acquaintances who are willing to help me make the blog a success (by whatever definition I so choose), and at times by complete strangers who just like helping out. This is one of the stranger stories, and I do mean that literally.

Another thing that’s amazed me is that I deliberately put a teaser in one of my posts (“coming up is ‘a stunning surprise’ “) and didn’t elaborate, and yet not one person exhibited any curiosity as to what it might be. You people expect me to do all the work for you?

In any case, remember how I just jokingly put “aerobatic flying” on my list because I was certain I would never get to do it?

I did it.

This started when I was on the ski trip, and I got to chatting with one of the guys on the trip who also happens to be a pilot. I was slightly too drunk or I would never have told him about the project, because I am modest, goddammit, but he apparently took it to heart when I said aerobatic flying was just some pie in the sky idea. Not that there would be actual pie, because small planes typically do not have meal service, but if there were, it would probably be cloudberry.

Because the next day at lunch (right after Stu the ski instructor broke our engagement), I met up with the group to eat, and one of the girls came racing over to me and said, “YOU’LL NEVER GUESS WHAT?!?” (She’s kind of a loud person, so I don’t think she was actually as excited as the caps imply.) “YOU’RE GOING FLYING!! IN A PLANE!! REMEMBER HOW YOU WANTED TO GO IN A PLANE? THERE’S A PILOT HERE WHO WANTS TO MEET YOU!!” And I remember exactly what I said then: “I’m not ready for that.”

But it was true. Dude just happened to run into to one of his friends, who was also skiing and who is also a pilot, and who just happened to fly aerobatics. That is, whenever he could find time off from running a dairy farm and fixing his own combine and shooting rattlesnakes and then, I dunno, challenging bears to arm wrestling matches or something. I spent lunch in a daze, not believing I was talking about flying and meaning it, and also listening to a lot of pilot shop talk, which is every bit as awesomely overburdened with testosterone as you are imagining. Mostly what I remember from that day is a lot of stories about how it’s a known issue that honest to goodness legally authorized pilots with no previous history of dying in fireballs will do a routine maneuver, unexpectedly get vertigo, and promptly crash into a lethal mountain. The term for that being “controlled flight into terrain,” or CFIT, which term I find to be utterly horrifying in its bland refusal to describe at all what it must actually be like to die that way.

Regardless, he and I arranged a date we would go flying and I spent most of the time in between telling everyone who would listen what I had planned. Most people tactfully told me it was a stupid idea. Trusting my life to a man (and a plane) I’d known for all of 45 minutes? Based on the recommendation of another complete stranger? I couldn’t see the problem. One of my friends felt strongly enough that he tried to talk me out of it:

Him: So you know you’re not supposed to get in a car with a stranger. But you’re getting in a plane with a stranger?

Me: I’m pretty confident he will not be able to molest me while flying a plane.

Him: What if he has auto-pilot?

Me: What if he has auto-molest?!?

Him: [long silence] Fine.

But to ease his mind, we agreed for my own safety that I would text him the pilot’s name, number, and our itinerary before going on this trip, except then I totally forgot. Oops.

The day before we were going to go flying, I texted the pilot, “Victor,” (who I promised to call by a pseudonym here, primarily because I’m not entirely certain that everything we did was 100% legal, and because he never exactly gave me a straight answer when I asked) to confirm we were still on. He said ok, then volunteered out of nowhere that he was at Toby Keith’s. I found this really confusing and slightly creepy until someone explained to me that this was also the name of a restaurant. I told him about my adorable mixup, and he mostly thought it was pretty hilarious I had never heard of Toby Keith’s. But then mostly everything I did he found hilarious, insofar as he is a big, burly, no bullshit, hard-drinkin’, snake-bitin’ rural type who is three times my size and whittles trees into fenceposts with his teeth, and I am pretty much a textbook pasty, sedentary, bleeding heart overeducated liberal city girl who still believes Obama’s birth certificate is real.

I drove up in the morning to the little airport where he stables his plane. I got there early, and before you die of shock I have to confess I was only 15 minutes early because he was 30 minutes late. From the outside, the airport just looks like corrugated metal boxes surrounded by razor wire and security cameras, so I didn’t exactly feel free to stroll around the grounds and take in the sights. Instead I decided to follow the advice I give to everyone, whether they’ve asked me for advice or not, and whether we even technically know one another: “Never pass up a chance to use the bathroom.”

I took a guess that there might be a public restroom in the giant two-story shiny marble building at the far end of the property. Either that or I’d be shot on sight when I attempted entry. I decided to take the chance. Carpe diem and all that.

Sometimes it happens that I don’t think things through. That was true in this case. I had a vague concept from visiting the dropzone in Eloy, which is purported to be one of the finest in the world, that the facilities here at the airport would be roughly the same as they are there. That is, toilets you’re not entirely sure are completely bolted to the ground or will reliably flush, mirrors that only mostly reflect, a plunger hanging on the wall in the stall with you and hand-written instructions taped next to it on how to unclog the toilet if need be, only technically functional soap dispensers with the same slightly smelly pink soap from elementary school, and raggedy, water-warped printouts taped to the wall announcing various upcoming (though admittedly extremely interesting) events.

Not so.

This bathroom I found because I was directed there by the pretty young receptionist sitting in a desk bigger, in terms of square footage, than my office of six people, and not because I just guessed like in Eloy and went in the door opposite of what I was pretty sure based on the steady stream of traffic and lack of immediately visible signage was the men’s room. Of course, it took me a while to get over to the pretty young receptionist, since the reception area was clearly also designed for holding cotillion balls and opera recitals, and it took me a good seven minutes just to cross the room, the squeaking of my Converse reverberating pitifully off the solid marble interior and her boring her professional smile directly into my skull the entire time.

I actually stopped when I entered the ladies room, just halted right in the doorway, because I thought for a second I wasn’t supposed to be there. I convinced myself for one terrifying moment that the pretty receptionist was calling security on me now like she had been trained to do in the event of vagabonds and carpetbaggers. This room, too, was made entirely of marble, even the hand towels. Everything was gleaming, so I could clearly see my baggy jeans and black t-shirt with the picture on it of Darth Vader that says “Who’s Your Daddy?” reflected in every surface. Large plants in the corners. Fancy liquid soap that smelled like vanilla in a pretty dispenser. But also on the counter were full-sized Cetaphil and Scope and designer fake scents. On an island opposite the sinks was a hair dryer, a curling iron, and for some reason, Lysol spray. I’d never seen anything like it.

That’s when I remembered that people who own planes also tend to own a lot of money, and use it to do things like building bathrooms larger than my first home, assuming I can ever save up enough to buy one. I mean, I’m not going to pretend like I think skydiving is cheap, but clearly we’re working with a whole different mindset here.

I took my sweet-ass time in the bathroom (ha). I freshened my breath. I moistened my skin. I applied some designer fake scent. I considered wetting my hair in the ginormous sink and blowing it dry again so I could give myself fat sausage curls, but this was time-prohibitive, plus I thought it might be weird to enter the bathroom with straight hair and come out looking like Little Orphan Annie.

When I finally ran out of products to use (I Lysoled a corner of the floor just for the hell of it), I went back over to the parking lot, getting there just before Victor arrived, and we headed over to his hanger. I’d never seen a private hangar before. It’s basically a wide garage that opens on both long sides. He opened it up and I saw there was a model plane parked inside. It was pretty cute, white with royal blue trim, but I started looking around for the actual aircraft.

“Here it is,” said Victor, pointing to a toy that had obviously been fished out of a cereal box. “Ha!” I said. He just kind of looked at me.

No, seriously, this was it. This tiny thing. Only slightly wider than me and the same height as the pilot. 150 horses. Big enough for two people to sit one in front of the other, if one person is small and breathes mostly out. Like a Smart Car with a 33′ wingspan. It’s a Citabria, he told me, which spelled backwards is “oh fuck me, this flies?”

But I’m not a jerk, mostly, so I didn’t say any of this until just now. Instead I went up to it and admired the paint job, though I couldn’t help noticing there was an odd repeating zigzag pattern all over the wings and body. “That’s from the cloth strips. Cloth keeps it light,” explained Victor.

“This plane is made of cloth?” I asked. I felt rude even putting those words together in that order, because I was certain I must have heard him wrong, as no one would be stupid enough to fly in a cloth airplane, not even professional stupid people.

“Just the outside. The frame is wood.”

“This plane is made of cloth and wood?” My stomach started to ooze out my nose, and I was getting that same feeling you get when you’re walking downstairs and you think there’s another step at the bottom, but instead there’s just a hole in the space-time continuum that if you go through it, it will plunge you into an alternate universe where the Federation never came into being. I felt a little woozy and wanted to lean against the plane for support, but I was genuinely afraid I’d break it.

“The cloth makes it easy to repair. Something punctures the wing, you just slap a patch on there and go.” Victor said this as though it’s a normal thing to say, and does not defy the laws of both physics and common sense.

My asking questions was obviously only making this situation worse, yet it was beyond my ability to stop. “And you do these repairs yourself?”

“Of course.” He said this with a chuckle, like only crazy people would get someone else to patch a hole in their cloth and balsa wood airplane.

I cleared my throat, closed my eyes for a moment, then continued digging my grave: “And things puncture the wings a lot, do they?”

He shrugged. “Only sometimes. Never know what’s going to happen up there. Mostly just on landing and takeoff, though.”

“And we’ll be doing both of those today, will we?”

“Come here, I’ll show you the engine.”

We went around to the nose cone (I think; I learned most of my plane terminology from reading Snoopy and the Red Baron comic strips, so bear with me here). Now, you know how your car hood is really heavy, and if you let it fall from about 12″ up, it’ll slam close and latch itself? Here on this plane, which flies in the dangerous air where there are apparently huge asteroid fields to navigate, the hood (flap? bonnet?) was made out of what looked like a repurposed cookie sheet. And I don’t mean the nice double layer heat-moderating air-insulated Teflon-coated kind, either. I mean the single piece of metal that bakes too hot and so you always wind up burning your cookies, and you can never quite get the grease off of it, and you’d give it to Goodwill except that’s where you got it from in the first place. Also there was a single wingnut holding it closed. One. The sheet pan was on the side of the plane, hinged on the top and opening upward, so a standing adult could easily look in at the engine, which we did, and which I immediately wished I hadn’t. Have you ever seen a motorized bicycle? I’m pretty sure that’s where this engine was cannibalized from.

He showed me all the pieces of the engine and named them all, using either hilariously irreverent pilot slang, or possibly actual mechanical words that I shouldn’t make fun of. All I remember is that there were at least two spark plugs, and that something in there was a “beaut.”

We did the whole pre-flight check, which actually was quite cool and made me feel all pilot-y. We walked a complete circuit around the plane, checking the capstan and the mizzenmast, testing the grommets, and making sure the slipstitch was secure. I was feeling pretty anxiety-free until he told me he was going to check the plane’s structural integrity, and the way he did that was to walk over to the end of one wing, grab the tip firmly in one hand, and pick the plane up and shake it. I mean off the fucking ground. The plane. He was holding it. It made a wubbety wubbety sound as he bounced it up and down, or maybe that was just my bowels.

“Did you hear any popping or creaking?” he asked me.

“No, I’m ok, thanks,” I said.

“Let’s check the fuel now.”

I never learn, it seems. I thought checking the fuel would be like testing the pH in a pool, with the little test tubes all lined up and filled with water, and you put the chemical tester in, and if it turns blue you’re not pregnant. There may also be litmus paper involved. So when he brought out a graduated cylinder and filled it with fuel from underneath the plane, explaining that if there were water in the fuel it would sink to the bottom, I asked in a very knowledgeable and scientific manner how one analyzes the fuel sample.

He looked at me with the look I was getting used to by now. “You smell it,” he said, sticking it under my nose. Yup, it was gas.

Then he told me he had a video camera and could mount it in the cabin if I wanted to film the whole thing. I thought he meant to film what we were seeing, and enthusiastically said yes. Then he clarified: did I want a video of me? Of just my face. Contorted in a rictus of terror and devoid of any physical context. I graciously declined. He tried to convince me, saying the videos were pretty funny to watch, since your hair stands up when you go upside down. I pretended my shoe needed tying.

But then it really was time to go. Since the front door (facing the airport grounds) was open and the back door (facing the parking lot) was closed, literally all we had to do was go. I thought you just started up the plane and taxied all the way out, but then he picked up a metal stick about four feet long, splitting halfway down to form a long, narrow bracket. It reminded me of a weenie roaster, or a REALLY big tuning fork. He fitted it neatly on two bolts near the rear wheel and, I shit you not, started pushing the plane out of the hangar. It glided forward gracefully.

“You just PUSH IT?!?” I observed coolly.

“Yup,” he said, not breathing heavily or anything.

“Can I push it??” I am totally suave.

He stepped aside so I could push his plane. Apparently pushing things is easier when you’re 6’6”, though, because when I tried, the plane stopped dead. I probably shouldn’t have taken it personally, but I did anyway. I leaned forward hard, trying to remember everything I learned about static friction in high school physics (hint: nothing). When I pushed, though, I guess I was too rough and it slipped off the bolts, making a sick cracking noise against the taillight.

“Christ, did I just break something?” I said by way of apology. This would be the first of about 1.3 million times I was to take the Lord’s name in vain that day.

Nothing was broken, thank god, since I have no idea where I would go to get replacement airplane parts, for fuck’s sake. This time he gave me a push-off and…then it was me. Pushing a plane. It was beautiful. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t even off the ground yet. I thought I could probably be a pilot, too.

Remember that part in Galaxy Quest when the crew gets aboard the ship for the first time, and they’re ready to launch the mission and everyone’s on the bridge, and Lt. Loredo, the boy wonder navigator, is trying to pilot the Protector out of spaceport, except his steering is off and everyone starts leaning heavily to the left in silent prayer that they won’t crash into the wall? I’m just saying pushing a plane and steering it at the same time is harder than it looks.

“Straighten out your nose!” shouted Victor.

“What the hell does that mean?!?” I shot back.

But it was fine. We only had about ten feet to go and I didn’t crash the plane. Also, according to caloriecount.com, an average adult burns 408 calories per hour pushing a plane into and/or out of a hangar, so I estimate I destroyed about 6.8 calories right there. Feel the burn.

He showed me how to get in the plane and shimmy into the back seat. (“That’s the brake. Don’t step on that. That’s the stick that flies the plane. Don’t step on that, either.”) I thought I could handle buckling the seat belt, at least, but even that is really freaking complicated and there are just straps all over the place. I accidentally ricocheted one of the buckles off the window a couple of times before he finally just did it for me. I tried to resist feeling like I was being strapped into a car seat.

In the Citabria, the passenger can’t really see much. I could see Victor’s head, and out the sides of the plane, and my own knees quaking in terror. Also the steering thing (drumstick? cantilever? bicuspid?) was wiggling around in an ominous manner. I decided that if I didn’t touch it, I couldn’t die.

Also this particular model of plane is really freaking small inside. Your average commercial airline seat is spacious by comparison. I deliberately did not try and see how much it would take to hit my head against the ceiling, because I saw Cast Away and I know what happened to the pilot. I’d compare it to an MRI tube, if that comparison didn’t give me hives just thinking about it.

He asked me if I was ready. I said, “Yeah!” Then I said, “No!” I was going to say “yeah” again, honestly, but he had already started take-off by then. Remember the story of the Princess and the Pea? How the princess could feel a single pea through 1000 feather mattresses or whatever? I’m not saying I’m a princess or anything, but I imagine this is very much what she would have felt like if she were flying her mattresses around. There aren’t any shock absorbers. The plane responds to every shift in air current by either teleporting five feet to the left, or plummeting 1000 feet straight down. And you can practically feel the wind beneath your feet, which I know sounds like a Bette Midler song or some shit, but just trust me on this one: it kind of sucks. Basically, try to imagine what it would feel like if the sky were punching you in the kidneys, and that’s a pretty good approximation of what take-off felt like.

Getting up to altitude wasn’t a whole lot better. It felt like this:

bump-bump-bump-bump-bump-bump-bump-bump-bump-bump-bump-bump-bump-bump-bump

[pause]

BUMP

So I was a little skittish and looked around for something to cling involuntarily to. Unfortunately, the cabin was pretty spartan, so my only choices were:

the door handle (said door having no actual lock, believe it or not)

the joystick

the brake

So I was on my own, clutching-the-plane-for-dear-life-wise. I chose what seemed like the least lethal option, which was to push out as hard as I could with my arms to either side of me, which had the triple advantage of keeping my hands busy, making me look foolish, and afterward causing my arms to rise on their own because ghosts are lifting them.

He told me what to expect as we got up to altitude and crossed multiple airspaces in rapid succession–mostly lots of chatter over the radio as he requested (and received) permission to cross into each new airspace. And what happened next was so odd I’m still not sure I heard it right, so I’ll do my best to be true to my memory. What I understood to have happened was that one of the air traffic controllers gave him instructions on where to fly (some coordinates, I think?), and he said roger roger, then flipped off his mic and said,

“Damn air traffic people, always barking orders. Jackasses. They think they can tell us pilots what to do, but they can’t. We tell ourselves what to do.”

And this struck me as a fundamental incompatibility in our thinking: I see air traffic control as a triumph of cooperative knowledge and an invaluable ally of pilots, preventing people from accidentally running collision courses with one another and providing critical safety assistance in times of crisis. He sees them as incompetent meddling pompous government bureaucrats. I chose not to examine our philosophical differences at that time.

As we passed into uncontrolled airspace, he took me low over a small mountain range to show me how amazing it looked, and to give me a fascinating and not at all horrifying tour:

“There are about 26 wrecks of planes in this range. Pilots down there too, but no one can get to ’em, or it’s not worth the time and money. One of them’s a Japanese plane from World War II, and I’ve never been able to get any good answer on how it ended up here of all places. If the military knows, they’re not saying. That one’s unique, though. They’re mostly American planes down there.” He banked slightly to cut across the range and give me a better view of the crevasses within, and pointed out some interesting geography. “Most of the wrecks are from people not paying attention while they fly,” he added, as he took video out the cockpit using his iPhone.

As we climbed to 9000 feet, I was beginning to feel slightly more at home in the air, but I was still doing my best Samson in the temple impression. He could tell I was having problems, so he didn’t press the issue, and instead explained some of the technical details behind aerobatics. “It’s not dangerous if you know what you’re doing,” he said. “But you can’t hold any of these maneuvers. For example, you can go upside down, but if you stay upside down you’ll have negative fuel. And it’s slightly disturbing to have your engine shut off at altitude.” I would have agreed with him, but I was too busy trying to pry at least one of my fingers off of my own skull.

I realized I had to get myself under control, because no way in hell was I going to just have him land again without doing anything terrifying. I tried some deep breathing, but I got the rhythm wrong and just ended up panting instead. “So,” came the voice of doom in my headset. “What do you want to do first?”

“Um. What’s the least scary thing?”

“You can get zero-g if you do it just right.”

“Let’s not start with that.”

“Well, I’m going to show you three-g, then.” I nearly asked him if he thought I was training to be a fucking astronaut, but thought better of it.

“Ready?”

“Yesnnno. Yes. No. Yes. No. NO. Yes.”

He waited. I took a huge breath and blew it out very, very slowly. “Yes, I’m ready.”

“Here we go.”

And then the entire universe collapsed upon itself into a singularity. There was no question of moving, even if I’d tried. The horizon whirled around me while I stood still. The plane stopped (seriously; I could hear the engine suddenly go very quiet), we spun, we spun, we spun. And then, like shooting out of a wormhole, space-time resumed its normal functioning, and suddenly we were going a million miles an hour in the opposite direction.

“THAT WAS AWESOME!” I shouted into the headset. And meant it. I couldn’t believe something humans created could do that. It felt passing the Übermensch into the next level of evolution. It felt god-like and dreamy and unreal. It felt like being a legend they tell about the beings that loved and fought and fornicated and created the earth. I probably could have shot lightning out of my fingers if I’d tried. I wanted to see how much closer to the sun I could get. “What’s next?”

He laughed. “You ready to go upside down?”

“No! I mean yes. I mean, you know I’m doing this because I’m terrified, right?”

“I know. Tell me when.”

I hesitated. Sure, the turn was great. But upside down is upside down, and I was already pushing some personal boundaries. I realized the thing he had done that made me feel most confident was when he was explaining what was happening. Apparently I have some aural cuing going on.

I had an idea: “If you talk to me while you’re doing it, will that break your concentration?”

“Probably.”

“Ok, don’t do that, then.”

Victor waited, the picture of patience.

I closed my eyes and opened them. I bit my lip, nearly drawing blood. I puffed out my breath. I may have barked. “Let’s do it.”

“Ok, this is called a split-S. We’ll do it to the left. We’re going to turn upside down, then loop up under and come back around.” I had no idea what he was talking about, but it sounded cool. “I’m ready.”

I have to give credit to that little plane: it really was built for aerobatics. Where as before it was all humpety bumpety Millenium Falcon on me, when doing maneuvers, it was graceful, sleek, and truly a thing of beauty. I watched the horizon slowly tumble around me, controlled and confused and wonderful. There was no up or down, no land or sky, only motion and time. I felt like I had become my own element, pure and eternal and unbreakable. Like I had become equal parts earth and air and breath and love. Like if I fell, God himself would catch me. Eventually we straightened out and began skimming along the sky again.

I breathed out for the first time in over a minute. Then I gasped and squealed in joy and pounded him on the back. “Do it again!”

“You got it. To the right this time.”

It was better. Oh, it was better.

Until my stomach caught up with me. “Oh, hey, that was great,” I said, swallowing that horrible warning saliva. “Can I have a minute?” I had deliberately not eaten breakfast, thinking the less I had to surrender the better off I’d be, motion-sickness-wise, plus now it was way past lunch, so you wouldn’t think there would be all that stuff still in my stomach. And yet suddenly I could feel every vibrating little curdle, each threatening to push its own eject button.

“Little pukey?”

“Yeah, I don’t know why. I was watching the horizon.”

“Don’t do that. You’ll get sick.”

Seriously?

“Well, what do you do to not get sick?”

“I watch my instruments.”

Well, that’s a big goddamn help. I might have argued the point, were it not for the fact that I had apparently just tossed all my innards in a washing machine and turned on the spin cycle. If only there were some kind of drug to help prevent the effects of motion sickness OH MY GOD I FORGOT TO TAKE MY DRAMAMINE. What a fucking dope.

“You want to do a hammerhead? That’s where you go straight up and come straight back down again.”

“Yes, but I’m very, very afraid of throwing up in your airplane. I really do need a minute.”

(I also desperately wanted to do a barrel roll.)

“You need to get down on the ground for a while?”

The hum in my stomach grew louder. It sounded like this. (Come to think of it, that’s probably what I looked like, too, by that point, especially at 1:28.) “I think that’s a great idea, yes.”

He started circling down. He pointed to a bare patch of desert that looked like every other bare patch of desert and said, “We’ll land there.”

“What?”

“It’s a landing strip.”

“What?”

“We’ll be down in a minute.”

So we just…landed. As we got up closer, I could see that there was a big X of clearing where little planes could take off and land, but boy you sure have to know what to look for. And since it turns out I do not have an iron stomach, especially when I forget my life-saving Dramamine, when we did finally land seven years later in seriously the middle of nowhere and I was able to wobble out of the plane and crouch motionless on the ground, I practically exsanguinated myself in relief.

I also thought at the time that all the really cool stuff was over, and felt deeply disappointed that that was all I could do. Fortunately it turned out I was very, very wrong. There are many more cool things you can do with and around and in a plane, and I did at least several of them. Tune in tomorrow for the exciting conclusion, in which I finally manage to get back in the plane and predictably have several more Star Wars fantasies. Plus shots are fired.

---