Pilots

Don Weber was aboard a piston airliner when an engine failed shortly after takeoff from Miami. Its propeller came to a sudden halt, and the eight-year-old boy could not understand why the airplane did not tip over during the short return to Miami. Perhaps, he thought, it was because he had leaned away from the dead engine and was helping to keep the plane upright. (He at least leaned in the right direction.)

Weber spent much of his childhood living under the final approach fix to Runway 22 Left at John F. Kennedy International Airport and spent endless hours admiring the grace and beauty of the silhouettes that made sweeping arcs over his home and onto final approach. He became enchanted by the magic of flight. He fantasized and later planned his career as an airline pilot.

At the age of 13, Weber asked his father if he could take flying lessons. "If you can pay for it, you can fly," his father consented.

Although quite a challenge "for a boy who could never save two nickels," Weber worked feverishly. It took two weeks to earn enough to pay for each lesson and a full day to take one because of the train connections required to travel to and from Long Island MacArthur Airport in Islip, New York. He soloed a Cessna 150 at 16 and became a private pilot on his seventeenth birthday.

By the time Weber graduated from high school, he was flying five days a week and had been accepted by Ohio State University as an aeronautical engineering major. This is when he took his first long cross-country flight. It was from Long Island to Janesville, Wisconsin, in a Piper Comanche. At the completion of a journey that gave the young man a bird's-eye view of Great Lakes and great mountains, he walked into an FBO and saw on a globe that for all of his effort he had traveled only an inch.

"Oh, my God," he realized. "We are so small and the world so large." He was overwhelmed by a "sense of absolute wonder," a revelation that became a turning point in his life.

Weber had always been close to his rabbi and active in his temple. This and the flight to Janesville lit a flame that grew brighter and illuminated aspects of his spirituality that he never knew existed. He also began to realize that being an airline pilot would mean having to fly where others directed. This bristled somewhat because he relished the freedom that flying offered.

So it was that a young man aspiring to commercial aviation eventually became a rabbi, but this did not interfere with his love of flight.

Weber's congregation at Temple Rodeph Torah in Marlboro, New Jersey, is well aware of its rabbi's devotion to general aviation. Weber uses examples derived from flying to develop sermons that relate to life on a broader scale. In one sermon, for example, he cleverly used a pilot's need for supplemental oxygen at altitude as an analogy for learning.

He also acknowledged in a temple newsletter following John F. Kennedy Jr.'s death that, yes, there is a risk in flying, just as there is in life itself. Each of us must determine which risks are worth the rewards.

Weber hangars his 1977 Cessna 172, N734RP (he likes to say that RP stands for rabbi's plane), at Old Bridge Airport near Freehold, New Jersey (best known as the birthplace of Bruce Springsteen). On occasion, he drives to the airport late at night to be with his Cessna. "It is so peaceful there, such a source of happiness, a wonderful place to relax, meditate, and communicate with God." He also goes to the airport to practice his sermons.

To Weber, flying and religion are inextricably linked. Both require trust and absolute faith in something that cannot be seen. It is not surprising, therefore, that the last item on his before-takeoff checklist mentions two prayers that he wrote especially for this purpose. "These remind me," he says, "of the extraordinary nature of what I am about to do. But my prayers may be forsaken," he continues with a smile, "when a rapidly approaching clearance void time threatens to delay an IFR departure from my nontowered airport."

For many of his passengers, the prayers turn a special moment into a spiritual one. Weber says that the prayers express gratitude for "being allowed to spend time in Your heavens" and "to see the world with new eyes." "Saying a prayer before doing something," he says, "is a way of sanctifying an action.

"When we drive," Weber elaborates, "all we see is concrete and other cars. But as soon as we lift off and climb, we begin to see an ever-expansive variety of topography. We live in a beautiful place but cannot appreciate it without the God-like view—new eyes—that wings provide."

The flying rabbi uses his 172 to share his joy of flight with his friends and three boys. His oldest son, Noah, will soon be soloing on his sixteenth birthday. He also uses N734RP to commune with nature and take trips with his wife, Shira Stern, who also is a rabbi. (She is a chaplain at the hospital where the author was born.)

Shira Stern has taken an AOPA Air Safety Foundation Pinch-Hitter® Ground School course and hopes to someday learn to fly. Although there are a few other flying rabbis in the United States, a husband-and-wife team of flying rabbis undoubtedly would be a first.