Flying / Looking Back
It is 10 years this spring since I started taking flying lessons, and 5 years since my license was current. For the past six months I have been working on revalidating my currency. I am SO SLOW, partly because of my persona as ‘The Flying Housewife’, partly because of the dratted weather. I was slow to get my license in the first place and I am slow to recover it. However, I do a practice test on Thursday. Today I was working on navigation and a diversion. In the rain. What fun! (My instructor said, ‘I love clouds. I really love clouds!’)
Honestly, I spend so much time working on handling, on practicing steep turns and stalls and forced landings - i.e., what to do in an emergency - that it always takes me by surprise when I find myself flying straight and level in the cruise, in trim, hands free, holding a heading toward a destination which won’t appear for another 15 minutes or so. Take a deep breath and look around! The sky is gray and full of cloud, but you can see the squalls and the hills and stay away from them. The fields of eastern Scotland are unbelievably green, except for the bright gold patchwork of oilseed rape here and there.
As I was doing the outside aircraft checks before take-off, a lark was singing over the runway, and I stopped to watch it - rising higher and higher, trilling constantly as it went, until I lost it. They seem to fly straight up.
I have been re-reading some of my notebooks in real time, from 10 and 20 years ago. I hardly wrote anything down during the first six months of 2002, and that is because I had a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old AND I was learning to fly. But sometime in August I did comment on the flying. Bear in mind, reading this, that I hadn’t even soloed yet when I wrote it.
You know what’s missing from this notebook? My flying lessons. Partly I feel like having a few measly old flying lessons doesn’t actually qualify you as learning to fly, and partly I am so swamped with learning it all and studying the books and doing the lessons that I haven’t got time to write anything down, and partly I am just scared out of my wits by it. Although I am not actually scared of the flying: I am scared of doing it wrong, of being on stage, of performing, of Looking Stupid. Isn’t that weird?
My flying is nothing. I have about 15 hours behind me. I can’t navigate, I can’t work the radio, I don’t know the law, I can’t do anything by instinct, I grip the control column in a death grip. But two things: steering the plane on the ground (I mean, how dull and prosaic can you GET?); and landing. They give me enormous satisfaction. In the last two lessons I have actually caught on to landing; and now I’ve been kind of walking around occasionally marvelling to myself, ‘Hey. I can fly a plane.’
Because it’s not cool; it’s massive hard work, and concentration, and boring reading, and humiliation, and disappointment (rain, failure) - and then, suddenly, ‘I can fly a plane.’
A bit like writing a book.
---------------------------------
And here’s part of my notebook entry for 20 years ago today. No kidding:
8 May 1992, Park Town, Oxford. I dreamed that I caught Loki at the tail end of my father’s funeral and, while not exactly outwitting him, managed to make a deal with him. He said, ‘I don’t make deals,’ and something to the effect of, ‘You’re playing with fire and you’re in over your head,’ and I said, ‘I happen to know that you made a deal with the Lord of the Dream World and that he took your hand in exchange for your freedom. Well, I can give you back your hand’ - which I had, right there, this disembodied hand - ‘But it’ll cost ya’ - thinking, Not a bad thing to have Loki in yer debt! …Hmm. I suspect that my part of the bargain has something to do with this short-story I was going to write. Note that my soul was NOT part of the bargain.
I want to say something like… Really, I just write the same thing over and over and over, don’t I?
And no, I’ve no idea what the short story in question was.
Honestly, I spend so much time working on handling, on practicing steep turns and stalls and forced landings - i.e., what to do in an emergency - that it always takes me by surprise when I find myself flying straight and level in the cruise, in trim, hands free, holding a heading toward a destination which won’t appear for another 15 minutes or so. Take a deep breath and look around! The sky is gray and full of cloud, but you can see the squalls and the hills and stay away from them. The fields of eastern Scotland are unbelievably green, except for the bright gold patchwork of oilseed rape here and there.
As I was doing the outside aircraft checks before take-off, a lark was singing over the runway, and I stopped to watch it - rising higher and higher, trilling constantly as it went, until I lost it. They seem to fly straight up.
I have been re-reading some of my notebooks in real time, from 10 and 20 years ago. I hardly wrote anything down during the first six months of 2002, and that is because I had a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old AND I was learning to fly. But sometime in August I did comment on the flying. Bear in mind, reading this, that I hadn’t even soloed yet when I wrote it.
You know what’s missing from this notebook? My flying lessons. Partly I feel like having a few measly old flying lessons doesn’t actually qualify you as learning to fly, and partly I am so swamped with learning it all and studying the books and doing the lessons that I haven’t got time to write anything down, and partly I am just scared out of my wits by it. Although I am not actually scared of the flying: I am scared of doing it wrong, of being on stage, of performing, of Looking Stupid. Isn’t that weird?
My flying is nothing. I have about 15 hours behind me. I can’t navigate, I can’t work the radio, I don’t know the law, I can’t do anything by instinct, I grip the control column in a death grip. But two things: steering the plane on the ground (I mean, how dull and prosaic can you GET?); and landing. They give me enormous satisfaction. In the last two lessons I have actually caught on to landing; and now I’ve been kind of walking around occasionally marvelling to myself, ‘Hey. I can fly a plane.’
Because it’s not cool; it’s massive hard work, and concentration, and boring reading, and humiliation, and disappointment (rain, failure) - and then, suddenly, ‘I can fly a plane.’
A bit like writing a book.
---------------------------------
And here’s part of my notebook entry for 20 years ago today. No kidding:
8 May 1992, Park Town, Oxford. I dreamed that I caught Loki at the tail end of my father’s funeral and, while not exactly outwitting him, managed to make a deal with him. He said, ‘I don’t make deals,’ and something to the effect of, ‘You’re playing with fire and you’re in over your head,’ and I said, ‘I happen to know that you made a deal with the Lord of the Dream World and that he took your hand in exchange for your freedom. Well, I can give you back your hand’ - which I had, right there, this disembodied hand - ‘But it’ll cost ya’ - thinking, Not a bad thing to have Loki in yer debt! …Hmm. I suspect that my part of the bargain has something to do with this short-story I was going to write. Note that my soul was NOT part of the bargain.
I want to say something like… Really, I just write the same thing over and over and over, don’t I?
And no, I’ve no idea what the short story in question was.
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