Excerpt from the book Air Fare

From On Extended Wings, Chapter One
by Diane Ackerman

You are seated tensely in the cockpit of a single-engine plane, one hand crushing the control wheel as if it were a test of grip strength at a fair, the other half-opening the throttle with a tentativeness that has nonetheless sent you charging down the runway at 40 mph, toward the thick, wreck-hungry forest edging the airport, called Sapsucker Woods. Half the runway is spent behind you, the air is a single loud growl of straining engine, the end of the runway is lunging up at you like a punch, and, at your right, an instructor is screaming, It's now or never! You jolt the throttle forward as far as it will go, the plane rears up on its haunches, and suddenly numbers float under you: 32, your age, but also the compass heading for the runway, 320 degrees, painted in white. Less jagged now, the engine fills the cabin with a steady surf that doesn't seem to break. For the first time, you feel the seat full against your back, and above the uptilted hemisphere of the instrument panel only clouds are visible. Leveling off, you can see the horizon jumpy with haze. The stick and rudder pedals move under your hands and feet in ghostly procession, and you are banking away from the skunk-backed macadam of the runway, and heading toward the north shore of Lake Cayuga, into a piece of sky designated a Practice Area. Oddest of all, you are walking there, left foot, then right on the rudder pedals to keep your nose straight. And, underneath you, the plaid of crops looks like a bar of campaign ribbons stretching flat in all directions at once. There is no longer the intimacy of details, but much perspective, and the air itself is thickly present, almost a lens.

The first lesson is a contest between your instincts and your will. Nothing is what it seems. You steer with your feet, not just with the wheel. Pulling the wheel back will make you go up a little, but mainly slower. The throttle isn't for making you go faster, but up and down. When you try to turn handily by using a combo of the wheel and rudder, you blurt the controls in such a panic that the smooth airflow over the wings breaks, and it feels as if you've stepped into a peat bog in the sky as you skid and slide.

Getting the "right picture" is everything, you're told. You thought flight was a long, lyrical chorus of ever-changing views of the planet, and now you discover it's a series of stills. Because you can't trust the instruments with your life, you must learn to judge whether you are climbing or diving, or at the correct angle for landing, or at a stall, or at the proper angle for takeoff—all by knowing what picture of the nose vis-à-vis the horizon will equal a specific airspeed. Fix the picture, the instructor urges, ordering you to fly straight and level, and yet, without meaning to, or even noticing that a minor trend has begun, you have let the wheel pull backward a shade and are slowly, effortlessly nosing toward a stall. He brings the plane back level on the horizon. Keep this picture! he commands, and for the tenth time since takeoff, he drags your hand right off the wheel. This time he makes you sit on it, so you'll be forced to fly left-hand-only-on-the-wheel; the right hand is used for throttle and flaps and trim and radio and all the paraphernalia on the right side of the plane.

Everything you do is wrong. And there's no remedy, for as soon as you concentrate on one of the six pieces of coordination it takes to fly, the others go. Just when you get the right picture (or airspeed), you aren't minding the throttle and drop 100 feet. The instructor erupts, becomes stern as an Old Testament God. In the air, 100 feet is nothing. But at 50 feet over the runway, it's death. Just when you get the throttle setting right, you lose control of bank and heading and are tolling across the sky. The dials are strange and difficult to read, the altimeter running both backward and forward, so that you must be able to tell whether the hands flexing between numbers are really 1:30 (only 500 feet high), or 2:30 (1,500 feet). A garbled message on the radio is addressing you. And when the instructor hands you the mike, you hold its black bakelite heart, press, and talk into the wrong side. He rearranges it in your shaking hand, as if showing you how to hold a fork for the first time. Relax, he says, try to relax. Then you repeat after him words your brain refuses to understand, so much of it is overextended in the auslands of dials and coordinated limbs, and in the desperate, pulse-gunning pump of adrenalin that stiffens every muscle and keeps your heart revving. Again he tells you to tell the tower your name— "Cherokee Warrior six-one-two-two Juliett" (with two t's), as it says on the panel—and that you're five miles northwest of the airport and wish to land. The tower replies with a noisy smear of information. "Twenty-two Juliett," you answer to confirm his message, though you didn't even hear him clearly, let alone decipher his instructions.

The controls continue to move without you, though your hands and feet rest lightly on them, following their dance moves, trying to fathom their logic. All that is expected of you today is this moment, this willingness to follow, an introduction to the shape of the movements that you will make, not how or why or when to make them. Your job on landing is walking the rudder straight so that you stay on the middle line of the runway, and it seems like a sop tossed to you, until, at touchdown, you swerve and skid over the line almost to the grass, and then back again as the instructor begs you louder and tougher to steer the plane back to the center line before you spin around and smash a wing.

Safely down and taxiing, you pull your hands and feet off the controls as if from separate fires, and give control back to the instructor, who had never relinquished it. Your muscles have been flexed hard and tight for half an hour without release, and now ache from the isometric lock they were in, some twitching so badly it's hard to climb out of the cockpit.

There is so much to remember, it's overwhelming. There's so much to be mastered; perhaps you can't master it, perhaps it requires a mathematical bent foreign to you. You were so much out of control. Your mind was sluggish, and it stammered, as eye muscles sometimes do when trying to make fast focus changes from far off to up close. Now you understand how terrifying it will be, and also how addicting, The pilot's seat is one of the few places on earth where one's life is truly one's own; there are no hideouts, compromises, misgivings, victims, benefactors. In a cavalcade of minute, urgent decisions, you must choose your fate. You can't risk being a passenger. But even if this existential itch weren't true, even if Nature weren't packed with wonders only viewable from aloft, and even if my curiosity weren't howling like a caged dog, I would still need to fly.

I don't feel particularly daring. To me, real courage is metaphysical and has to do with keeping one's passion for life intact, one's curiosity at full stretch, when one is daily hemmed in by death, disease, and lesser mayhems of the heart. Still, I am compulsively drawn to pastimes most people would find frightening. Some women consciously pursue danger, as a way of touching the fabric of their mortality. Daredevils, I mean, who need to live close to the edge to feel fully alive, who need to experience a constant state of rescue or reprieve. For me, it's just a case of my curiosity leading with its chin: things fascinate me whether they are dangerous or not. I don't need to fly because flying doesn't frighten me; I need to fly even though it frightens me, because there are things you can learn about the world only from 5,000 feet above it, just as there are things you can learn about the ocean only when you become part of its intricate fathoms.

It isn't that I find danger ennobling, or that I require cheap excitation to cure the dullness of routine; but I do like the moment, central to danger and to some sports, when you become so thoroughly concerned with acting deftly, in order to be safe, that only reaction is possible, not analysis. You shed the centuries and feel creatural. Of course, you do have to scan, assess, and make constant minute decisions. But there is nothing like thinking in the usual, methodical way. What takes its place is more akin to an informed instinct. For a compulsively pensive person, to be fully alert but free of thought is a form of ecstasy.

Being ecstatic means being flung out of your usual self. When you're enraptured, your senses are upright and saluting. But there is also a state when perception doesn't work, consciousness vanishes like the gorgeous fever it is, and you feel free of all mind-body constraints, suddenly so free of them you don't perceive yourself as being free, but vigilant, a seeing eye without judgement, history or emotion. It's the shudder out of time, the central moment in so many sports, that one feels, and perhaps becomes addicted to, while doing something dangerous.

At first, the only and ultimate fright is of trusting, releasing yourself to the present. Flight is nothing but an attitude in motion. If you're shaped right and go fast enough and tilt your nose to where you'd rather be, you can't help but leave the ground. Your wheels will dance, your wings will stray a bit, and then you will levitate as no fakir ever could, thanks to the reliable sorcery of nature. All things are transmutable when they break down to their lowliest components of cell and atom. A wing is only rigid and awkward on the ground; in the sky it is a rapid knife so sharp and delicate it can slice through interfolding tissues of air. The real terror is in the letting go, the willingness that first time to run the throttle full open and race down the runway, with hangars and trees and cars blurring helplessly at the edges of vision, to abandon everything known, safe, and significant, and to leap into the terrible invisibility of the sky. The sky that could fall in fairy-tale hysteria, the sky in which Heaven is pictured and gods of all nations are enthroned, the sky that leads to the blackness with which one envisions infinity and the unimaginable subtraction of sensuousness we call death. The first terror is the oldest and most rugged: the fear of leaning into nothingness.