How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Fly the Damn Plane

I was terrified. I don't mean occasionally. I mean that terror, as an emotion, as a prevailing mood, had overtaken my life. I woke in the night gulping for air, my heart going faster than ever. Why? Another bad dream. It was 3:13 a.m. There was no getting back to sleep. In that dark and terrible hour, I thought dire things.

From where did the terror spring? How could I put it back in the bottle? I didn't know. I couldn't trace it back to any one thing. I was about to turn 40. Was that it? In the end, I assumed it was death. Death, for me, is bound up in everything: my fear, my ambition. Humor, sex, the urge to travel. Death is why I shouldn't drink. Death is why I do.

Last summer, I watched my dad die. That might have been the source of it. I saw him laid out upon a hospice bed in the library of his house in Park Ridge, Illinois. It left me feeling more vulnerable than usual. Or perhaps—and this was the most terrifying thought of all—the terror sprang from nothing and was here to stay.

That summer was a good one for terror. ISIS. Ebola. The kidnappings by Boko Haram. Russians invading Ukraine. Israelis and Palestinians at war again. The police shooting in Ferguson and the mess that followed. Warnings of drastic climate change and continued odd weather. I saw birds flying what seemed like meaningful patterns and I thought nothing was immune from the taint of terror

So what did I do? I decided to learn how to fly.

"PEOPLE UNFORTUNATELY DIE IN FLIGHT TRAINING. I WOULD THINK THAT WOULD BE THE WORST THING."

To go up in the air inside a machine is a very stupid thing to do. It is also transcendentally cool and extremely practical. We go up for sport. We go up for commerce. We go up for war. We go up so effortlessly and routinely these days that it's easy to forget what it entails: the elevation of a mighty payload of metal and fuel, with souls aboard, by the incorporeal air. Physics says it's possible over and over again on the departures board at JFK, but common sense stubbornly insists that it's just plain dumb.

The variable in every flight is the pilot. The laws of physics might be absolute, but with human beings there are no guarantees. Physics doesn't care what the pilot does, because whether the pilot lives or dies, its rules will be respected. Physics is like the indifferent farmer in Bruegel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus: as the prideful pilot–child plunges into the sea, physics plows on with its day's work.

Today, flying is nothing. We've been doing it for over a hundred years. The golden age of aviation gave way to the golden age of air travel, which has soured into a protracted era of airline-induced misery. The contemporary commercial flight is a shrug and a hassle. The seats have shrunk, the crew hates the passengers and the passengers hate each other, and for everything there is a fee. Romance has quit the skies.

But do it yourself—pilot a plane from takeoff to landing, in command of every climb and dive—and see if your pulse doesn't quicken and the raw color come back to your eyes.

The question is no longer, Can we fly? The question to ask yourself is, Can I fly?

Daniel Shea

I took flying lessons for four months from Tom Fischer, who, with his wife, Jodi, runs Fischer Aviation in Fairfield Township, New Jersey. Seeing Tom for the first time, my initial thought was that a man could not have been better engineered for flight instruction. A pale man of substantial build, with eyeglasses and a shaved head, he split the difference perfectly between an Army general and a sixth-grade math teacher. If he seemed reserved at first, laconic in the style of a military man, and if I generally liked my teachers verbal and out-going, that was okay. His first task was to keep me alive, and I didn't mind if the job description called for the occasional silence.

My ultimate objective was to fly solo. I was never confident that I would actually do something so reckless and brave. I mean to say I didn't think it possible, either physically or psychologically. I'm not a mechanically inclined man, but I am a man scared to death of flying. Sweaty palms, rapid heartbeat, darting eyes, hands gripping armrests, tears on standby, a scream ever perched on the edge of my teeth. And that's before takeoff. For me, there is terror, and then there is the terror of flight.

I was not always so afraid. In the eighties, after my parents split and my mom moved us away, I'd board a plane several times a year for Chicago. These trips north were my reason to live. They reunited me with my dad. I loved airplanes back then, even the weird engine sounds and Reagan-era turbulence. The stewardesses gave me a pair of golden wings to pin to my shirt, and when I was really lucky, a free can of Sprite all to myself. At that time, anyone could go to the gate without a ticket, so I'd come down the gangway to find my dad standing there with a big smile on his face, tears in his eyes, arms spread wide, and I'd run into that man's embrace and breathe in his aftershave and I'd know that I was home

THE QUESTION IS NO LONGER, CAN WE FLY? THE QUESTION TO ASK YOURSELF IS, CAN I FLY?

Much later, in 2003, I boarded a flight out of John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California. I was by then a nervous flier, which I differentiate from the wreck, the puddle, and the basket case. I was, in other words, acquiescent but attentive. I listened for changes in engine noise, alive to every ripple and quiver of rough air. Some flights departing John Wayne are required to climb very high very quickly and then cut back the engines to reduce noise as they glide over the wealthy neighborhoods down below. For a full minute, it felt to me like I was inside a rocket. When we leveled off, the first thing I noticed was the sunlight. As it streamed in through the windows across the aisle, I seemed to be able to pick out each individual ray. That was the cabin beginning to fill with smoke

Two things happened next. The first was the sounding of a high-pitched, continuous, not-too-loud bell—the smoke alarm. The second was a faint odor, indisputable and growing stronger: an industrial smell, like someone using turpentine to burn a plastic toy. By the time my fellow passengers stirred from their naps and magazines, we were in the thick of an emergency. Panic set in quickly. There were screams, tears. The woman in front of me began to hyperventilate. The plane turned back, but because we had climbed like a rocket, we now had to come down like one. The descent did not seem planned or orderly. It felt like we were crashing. The captain offered us no reassurances, only a single, harsh instruction: "Breathe through your shirts." I watched in dismay as the stewardess, stricken and useless, put on her chest harness. The woman next to me kept asking between sobs if we were still over water. We were. I put my arm around her. I was strangely calm. A mother held hands across the aisle with her son. We all waited for impact.

But impact never came. We touched down shakily but intact. We were met by emergency vehicles. We filed off the plane. Two free vouchers arrived in the mail a few months later, along with an explanation. The motor responsible for pressurizing the air had burned out and released smoke into the cabin. The plane itself was fine.

But part of me feels like I've been living on borrowed time ever since.

"What's the worst that can happen to me?" I asked Tom before we took our first flight together.

"On a training flight?"

I nodded. Tom and I were very different men, if based only on our choice of professions. I'm a writer who never enjoys lifting my butt off the office chair. Ideally I don't leave the house, and a perfect day is one in which I don't get out of bed. Tom, on the other hand, departs the earth multiple times a day.

"People unfortunately die in flight training," he said after a long pause. "I would think that would be the worst thing."

Ha ha. Yes.

"I tell people all the time," he added, "it's a lot of fun, but it's not a game."

With that, we headed out to the airfield.

I ASKED TOM WHAT YEAR THE PLANE WAS MADE."1966," HE SAID. THAT WAS THE FIRST TIME I WANTED TO RUN

The last time someone taught me to do something big with a machine, I was learning how to drive. By then I had moved north to live with my dad. He had been teaching me to drive for years. I was 7 when he first put me on his lap and let me steer the car around the parking lot. Now I was old enough to do it on my own. At night, on sleepy suburban streets, he and I went out and worked on things like signaling and turning and braking on time. I was a trepidatious student. The simulation videos in driver's ed instill in the sensitive young man the conviction that at any given instant he is about to strike and kill a child on a tricycle. I didn't want to kill anyone, so my general approach behind the wheel was to look, accelerate, brake, look, accelerate, brake, until, inch by inch, we made our way down the street. This tried my father's patience. He was a man who liked speed

During my time in the air with Tom I would be reminded of all the time I spent in the car with my dad. My reluctance to assert myself on the stick and rudder was not unlike my reluctance to go above fifteen miles per hour while white-knuckling the steering wheel. At a certain point in my driver's education, when I knew how to accelerate and brake and all the rest, and the only thing that stood between me and authority was fear, useless fear, my father said to me, "Just drive the damn car!" This command came back to me from the beyond at some point during my flying lessons. Twenty-five years later I was still listening to my old man. Now I sometimes think that the story of how I learned to fly is really just the story of how I learned to stop worrying and fly the damn plane.

I would like to introduce you to my airplane. We call it Six-Two Romeo, after the call sign painted on its fuselage. It is a single--prop Piper Cherokee Cruiser. It has four seats and wings perched below the pilot rather than above. It has a wingspan of thirty feet and weighs 1,250 pounds fresh from the bath. It's a snug ride. Tom and I sit thigh to thigh. The student is on the left, the instructor on the right. The plane is engineered with dual controls. Its underbelly is painted brown, with twin ribbons of gold flowing along the fuselage. There was, I thought, something dated about its design. I asked Tom what year the plane was made

"1966," he said.

That was the first time I wanted to run away. (I would want to run away with stunning regularity, often while 2,500 feet up in the air.) On the one hand, a plane built in 1966 has demonstrated an extraordinary safety record. On the other hand, sooner or later, everyone's luck runs out, and that Cherokee had almost fifty years under its belt. How much more could we reasonably expect from it?

"Isn't that kind of old?" I asked him.

He paused before answering. "I was born in 1967," he said.

We began to laugh. Ha ha ha.

My problem was a lack of faith. In order to better understand people who deny scientific knowledge that I find easy to accept, like evolution or the man-made causes of climate change, I merely need to remember my skepticism toward the indisputable physics of flight. I had a hard time believing that flying was possible, no matter how often I'd gone up and come safely back down. I didn't just think Tom's 1966 Cherokee alone would fail to hold together. I thought every plane I boarded would fail to hold together. A thing of such size, subject to such wear and tear, was bound to break apart, inevitably with me in it.

A year or so after my emergency landing at John Wayne Airport, when my fear of flying was at its most rabid, I tried to get a handle on it. It was summer, and I had an oscillating fan going in the bedroom. During the hot months that fan went round and round all day and all night. I looked at it, at its spinning blades and rotating head, and wondered why I never had the same worries about it that I had for all the planes I boarded. The stakes weren't the same, of course, but was an airplane not a machine like the fan? The fan worked unfailingly, without a single hour of maintenance, and had for years and years, and I never once questioned my perfect faith that it would continue to do so for years into the future. Why should I not have the same faith in an airplane? If anything, an airplane is subject to more scrutiny than a household fan, its use is heavily regulated by the FAA, and entire maintenance crews are devoted to keeping it safe and operational. After this little epiphany, whenever I boarded a plane, I took enormous comfort in my simple fan and its continuous and faithful turning.

Then the fan broke.

Daniel Shea

The airport out of which Fischer Aviation operates is called, informally, Caldwell Airport. It's off Passaic Avenue, hidden behind some chain-link fencing. Blink and you'll miss it. Compared to Newark or JFK, it's a parking lot full of toy planes and a patch or two of tarmac. (I was surprised to discover during my time in the air just how many little airports there are, at least in that corner of New Jersey, several of which are uncontrolled. Accustomed as I was to the strangulating regulations of commercial flight, I found amateur aviation still very much a scrappy, DIY thing, just some guys taking their winged go-karts up for a spin.)

Out by the plane, the first thing Tom and I did was go through the preflight checklist. Never am I more skeptical about the ultimate wisdom of our experts in aviation than when I see some short-sleeved pilot suffering the indignities of wind and rain to stand beneath the belly of a plane and eyeball the structural integrity of a row of rivets. That's it? I think. That's safety? But it was no different with Six-Two Romeo. Tom and I crouched and contorted, we loomed and looked as we inspected the plane's bolts, pins, winches, and wingtip lights. We felt down the length of the propeller for any imperfections. We stopped before the cowling (what I wanted to call the hood), and Tom popped it open like the lid on a lunch box to reveal an engine that could have been started with a few yanks on a pull string. We checked it for fire damage and the presence of animals. In everyday life, I have grown accustomed to a computer or some other device mediating between me and the world. The digital magically renders error and danger obsolete. But search an engine for animals and you know you're back to the basics. It's just you and your eyeballs and whatever faith they can lend that the engine hasn't been molested by some rabbits.

TO GO UP IN THE AIR INSIDE A MACHINE IS A VERY STUPID THING TO DO. IT IS ALSO TRANSCENDENTALLY COOL

As things progressed, I continued to see just what a thoroughly analog experience flying can be. In Six-Two Romeo there is no autopilot, no computer, no digital communication between the pilot and the controls. A commercial Airbus or Boeing jet might be one intricate and high-powered mainframe, but Tom's Piper Cherokee was a distant cousin of the lawn mower. Expand the motor on your rider and take away a wheel, enclose the seat and add one for a buddy, throw on a pair of wings, and presto. Your grass eater is now ready for takeoff.
It was kind of thrilling. Here was a well-engineered (if a tad aged) block of metal and wire nestled inside an aerodynamic hull. It was going to put me up there in the blue sky as if by magic. And I would guide it there using nothing but my hands and an intimate physical knowledge of how it worked. No updates, no inputs, no hitting enter. Just me and the 1.0 world

Once through with the inspection, we climbed into the cockpit. We put on seat belts escaped from the back seat of an Oldsmobile. The analog nature of the Piper Cherokee continued to reveal itself. The yoke, which controls both the pitch and the bank of an airplane, moved in and out and left to right with the matter--of-fact functionality of a primitive arcade game. The rudder pedals at my feet were notched, metallic, and brutal. There was a trim tab control (I did not know what any of this meant practically) affixed to the ceiling that resembled the hand crank of a window in a municipal building, while the wing flaps were controlled by what looked like an emergency brake lever. I would come to learn that at certain critical moments, such as landing, the pilot, manipulating all of these controls at once, can look not unlike one of those multi-instrumentalists simultaneously strumming the guitar, blowing the harmonica, and tapping a foot drum.

I started the propeller with the push of a button. I struggled to insert my two headphone jacks into the instrument panel—a poor harbinger of my competency with the more complicated controls before me. Then Tom radioed to air traffic control and we taxied to the runway.

As I sat before the yellow lines waiting for takeoff that first time, my heart banging for its jailers inside my chest, I had second thoughts. Even now I wonder: Would I have started down the path toward a solo flight—what I had begun to call my date with the NTSB—if I had known then what was coming? I'm thinking of the time, six lessons in the future, when I pointed the plane at the runway nose down as we were landing and didn't know it until Tom took the controls. Or the time I failed to recover from a stall because I forgot how, and instead of pulling back on the yoke to initiate a positive climb, I just let us fall, with stomachs bottoming out as we stared down at the tops of trees, until Tom took the controls. Or the time I just let go of the yoke at a critical moment and Tom said, "Don't let go!" Or the time I should have gone around during a touch-and-go but decided to try to land anyway, going too high and too fast, and we wobbled violently very close to the ground until Tom took the controls. Or during yet another landing, when I came into ground effect and suddenly yanked up on the yoke so hard that we started to climb again, but having such little speed we were close to stalling out, and Tom called for more power to get us out of that mess, but, for reasons that still elude me, I simply didn't react, and we might have dropped to our deaths if he hadn't, once more, taken the controls.

I didn't know any of that before taking off with Tom for the first time down runway 22 in Six-Two Romeo. I couldn't have anticipated the number of times he'd save my hide from ruin, or how frightening it was to play back the day's mistakes, or how the airplane would start to invade my dreams. I sensed only my fear, as well as a vague necessity.

My father couldn't breathe toward the end of his life. Pancreatic cancer, which he'd somehow gotten the better of for seven long years, had finally overtaken his lungs. In the days and weeks after his death, I, too, couldn't breathe. I felt, in life, little distinction between my dad and me. We extended our imaginations to one another. That's what love is. It was impossible for me to stop doing so just because he was dying. If he could ail, I could ail. If he could die, I could die, too. The world was suddenly unrecognizable and more dangerous than before. More vulnerable. More terrifying.

It took months after my dad passed away for me to understand that I wasn't going to follow him immediately to the grave. It was his turn, unfortunately, not mine. I wasn't even 40 years old yet. No matter how wrecked I felt as I watched him die, I wasn't going to just give out. Neither was that old Piper Cherokee, not with the love and attention Tom paid it. I had to have a little faith. I was scared, but I had to live. For me, and for my old man. And what's the best way to live in the face of death?

Fully is always the best way to live.

Just fly the damn plane.

So when Tom gave the command to engage the throttle on Six-Two Romeo, I engaged the throttle, and we turned, and took the center line, and off we went, down the runway and into the air.