Learn to Fly

A Portrait of the Artist as a New Pilot

A realization that what's missing is flying

BY DAN NAMOWITZ

The idea — no, the desire — had always been there, lying dormant amid the concerns and responsibilities of everyday life. But on a sunny summer afternoon, a decade ago, something made it too strong to ignore.

Sound like the beginning of a paperback romance? Boy meets girl, sparks fly, and the reader gets 300 pages of steam to liven up those daily commutes into the city.

Well, this is a love story, and if you substitute a thirtysomething newspaper reporter for the he-hero and have him meet his lady love offstage, somewhere near the middle of Act Three, you will have "the rest of the story" of how I came to fly.

It was a passion unrelated to flying — my hobby of wildlife photography — that brought out the unborn pilot within me. On the summer day in question, I took a break from my relentless scouring of the north Maine woods in search of the ultimate moose photograph and decided to follow up a friend's tip that a bountiful harvest of wild Maine blueberries could be picked in the fields adjacent to a nearby country airport.

Hardly was the treasure discovered and my container beginning to fill with berries when a single-engine, low-winged airplane began to taxi down the runway toward me. It passed the spot where I crouched over the low bushes, wheeled into the wind, and took off with a surging roar from its engine.

I went back to my harvesting, with visions of pie a la mode dancing in my head. A few minutes later, another airplane, this one a sturdy-looking twin-engine model (I had no idea what kind) duplicated the actions of the first. This time I stood up to watch as the craft pivoted into the breeze for takeoff. A man and a woman were in the front seats. The woman waved at me as the machine faced down the long runway. This time I listened attentively to the engines as they spoke, and the two propellers as they hissed and heaved the craft forward. "This is something I have always wanted to do," whispered a long-silent voice within me as the airplane climbed toward the sun.

Returning to work in the city the next morning, the vision was still with me, so I made a resolution: "The time has come." Like many prospective student pilots, my reasons for embarking on my journey into aviation were unclear. Sure, my uncle had flown Thunderbolts and Mustangs in the Pacific, and I had worn his Army Air Corps wings around the house as a kid. One of our family's traditional stories was the one about the time he took my grandmother for a ride in a military training airplane; a photograph of them posing by the AT-6 in their flight suits sits on my grandmother's dresser to this day. At least one distant cousin is a pilot. But it had been many years since the last time I had buzzed my parents' living room with a plastic miniature DC-3 in my hand, making engine noises ("Ree-OWWwww") at the top of my lungs. Baffled and a bit embarrassed by this vague vision of the project I was about to undertake, I stewed for a few days, then approached an official of the city I covered for my newspaper, knowing that he was a pilot for Eastern Airlines and the owner of a classic World War II airplane, and asked him how to go about becoming a pilot.

Captain Don Davidson wasn't the least bit put off by my question. Nor did he seem surprised to discover that the pushy newspaperman who usually questioned him about municipal budgets and back-room political maneuvering suddenly wanted to fly. I realize now that Davidson understood my condition all too well. He gave me the name of two companies offering flight instruction at the city airport. I picked one and made the phone call. The woman who answered the telephone was helpful (and the fact that no one had laughed at me so far made me feel encouraged). She said a ground school for private pilot trainees would be starting up in a few weeks. It would be taught by Alan Berger, the company's young chief flight instructor (now with TWA). I enrolled.

After that first absorbing class, Berger walked his new students down the hall to the pilot shop where neat stacks of training books and other necessary supplies had been assembled for us. Back behind the counter in the lobby downstairs, Berger caught me by surprise as I was leaving, by opening the huge, floppy aircraft-scheduling log and asking, "So, Dan, when would you like to start flying?"

How weird. There I was, a 31-year-old newspaper reporter whose total experience with flying had consisted of numerous fumbled childhood attempts to put together model airplanes, one round trip on United Airlines from New York to Iowa, with a change of airplanes in Chicago, to visit my sister; a 10-minute flight over Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire, for my first newspaper with a pilot named Alan Emerson; and being assigned to cover the 1981 air traffic controller's strike as it had played out at the Boston Air Route Traffic Control Center. And now I would be flying — in a little orange and white Cessna 152 that is still turning out pilots in Nashua, New Hampshire, as this is being written.

I brought home the stack of books and plunged headlong into the Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge. I looked askance at my new course plotter, flight computer, and the Private Pilot Written Test question book, but dutifully read my assignments in the book of uncleverly written Federal Aviation Regulations. I passed my third-class medical exam but resolved to go on a diet. I had always been interested in the natural sciences and was delighted to find that a book on meteorology was part of the curriculum. As the first page of my pilot logbook began to fill up with flight entries in Alan's tiny handwriting, I read each line over and over, thereby reliving each wonderful flight. Drawn to aviation at every opportunity, I began conducting newspaper interviews in the airport coffee shop. From there, the view of the runway was, and is, great.

I began flying in early November. Ground school ended the next month, and I passed the FAA written test. Alan soloed me in January; I had 13 hours of logged flight time. My nonpilot friends (as I was beginning to call them) weren't sure whether to believe me when I told them I could now fly with no one else in the airplane. As my training continued, Alan and I did cross-country training flights to Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, Connecticut; Portland, Maine; and Providence, Rhode Island. Wow. Next, I soloed to several airports and then, on a long exhilarating outing in May, accomplished the required 300-mile solo flight on a triangular route from Nashua to busy Albany, New York, down to Bridgeport, Connecticut, and back to Nashua.

In June, Alan married the girl behind the counter, Lisa, and landed a job (no pun intended) flying for Pilgrim Airlines. "Crisis!" I thought. My instructor is leaving. Fear not, he promised, he would "finish me up," with help from some of the other instructors on the staff. He kept his word, as he always did during my training course, and on a fine morning in early July, as a new crop of blueberries ripened in the fields around a small Maine airfield, I walked into my newspaper office and placed my new temporary pilot certificate on the desk of the close friend and coworker who had been putting up with my "airplane talk" for the better part of a year. She picked it up, read it, hugged me, and took me out to lunch to celebrate.

A fitting end to the tale, perhaps, but in truth it was only the beginning. There's a saying in aviation that each new step you take, each new flying privilege you acquire, is really a license to learn, an invitation to refine skills you will be sharpening until the end of your aviation career. You may stop training, but you will never stop learning, if your mind remains open to the many lessons of the air. Although I would go on to become a working pilot and flight instructor, I will always be a student pilot at heart, eager to experience another side of flying, or to know flying better, or to be able to teach it with greater ease. The original allure — the challenge, the stimulation, the breathtaking views — is as fresh to me today as it was the day of my first lesson.

When I moved to Maine some months later to take up an editing position at another newspaper, I decided that the increased distance from friends and family meant that I needed to add instrument-flying privileges to my private pilot certificate. It was during this return to training that I began to consider aviation as an alternative to the office-bound career in light of my love of the outdoors and my increasing fascination — I won't fuss if you say "obsession" — with flight. I was single, well-paid and ob ... I mean, motivated.

I earned my commercial pilot certificate and made the jump to aviation. My first job was as a line attendant, weekend office-watcher, and occasional ferry pilot. Salary: $250 a week, no bennies. Shortly thereafter, I passed my instructor's exams and added instrument flying to my instructing credentials. Then I caught a break. At a nearby flight school, the chief pilot, a writer who knew me from my travels in journalism, gave me my first full-time job instructing. Thanks, Sandy Reynolds. The money, to be sure, was awful. (Don't try this at home, folks.) But the joy of flying all day over some of the most spectacular scenery on the East Coast, with a flock of dedicated new students entrusted to my care, sharing a gift that man has enjoyed for a mere 90 years of our species' entire history, was a form of compensation I had never had before.

I'm 40 now, with a few years as a working pilot, flight instructor, and aviation writer under my belt. I live 3 miles from the airport. I listen to the local pilots — my friends — on a radio next to the coffee pot as I write stories for AOPA Pilot or fill out student training folders. I have a house in the city and a little cabin up in the wilderness near a small Maine airfield. I keep a battered 1974 Chevy parked there so I'll have ground transportation when I fly in. The blueberries that grow there are still beyond compare. And I always wave at the berry pickers as I taxi by.

Dan Namowitz is a multiengine-rated commertial pilot and CFII living, flying and instructing in Maine.