Another world for pilots

The magic of the craft has opened for me a world in which I shall confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings, and when night has fallen I, delivered, shall read my course in the stars.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, ‘Wind, Sand, and Stars,’ 1939.

I have seen things when flying that ground-bound people can’t imagine. The inside of purple storm clouds, the St. Elmo’s fire against the windshield of my 727 as it bounced through heavy precip. Sunrises over the Atlantic, Pacific, and even Lake Michigan.

How many people get to begin their day in Kentucky and after flying themselves to Europe lay their head on a pillow in Paris and get paid for it? How often did I fly over sleeping cities in the pre-dawn, bemoaning my fate to be awake yet not envying for a single second the people below who faced another day of boringly predictable days?

Today I still court and play with clouds that others see as sun blockers and annoyances. Snow on the ground evokes thoughts in my head of braking action reports and de-icing fluid types. Pilots see the world in a totally different way than ground-bound people. We notice clouds and automatically and without thought catagorize them according to the smoothness or roughness we would encounter when flying through them.

Student pilots learning about aviation are privy to this new world from the first time they try to taxi with their feet. They fly the shallows of the pond like guppies but they are still part of the larger aviation lake.

Airline passengers pull down their shades in order to see their airborne TV’s. We open the shades wide to see the ground and the sky. To them airplanes are a fancy kind of train or car. To we pilots, an airplane, even an airliner, is a friend and the revealer of magic and freedom.