Muserology Cafe

Discovery Flight (November/December 2010)

by Isabel Cleff, age 14, Pennsylvania

The brush slid down the side of the pool, kicking up algae and dust. It swirled around in the clear water, churning almost as much as my stomach was. I stole a glance up at the sky and felt the knot forming in my stomach tighten and twist. The chime of a phone ringing interrupted my thought, and my head snapped up. My dad answered.

"Hello? This is her father speaking. Is it? Oh...that's too bad. Tomorrow, then. We'll come over and take a look around, anyway. Thanks." He hung up the phone. "That was the airport. It's too windy today. We'll go up tomorrow, instead. Let's just stop over and take a look at the planes, anyway."

"OK," I replied.

Relief. Pure relief. 

It was a breezy Saturday morning, and I was going to take my first flying lesson. A "discovery flight," the airport dubbed it. I had thought it would be exciting, an adventure. It had been easy enough to talk about doing it. But now it was actually here, about to happen. And I was scared. 

My dad, my uncle, and I drove to the airport despite the wind that kept us grounded, just to look around. They were having an open house, and people were lined up at a picnic table, buying tickets for tomorrow, to ride one of the Cessnas lining the runway. How can they be so nonchalant about it? I wondered. They make it seem like it's no big deal. So why am I so terrified? 

The next day, the knot was back in my stomach. I knew that there would be no wind today. No matter how much I didn't want to, I had to get in that plane. If I didn't do it toay, I never would.

I sat in the office area of the airport building, waiting for the pilot to walk in. Finally, he came through the door and shook my hand with a genial smile. He took keys and a headset from the front desk, and we walked out to the plane. 

After a visual check-up of the plane (during which I found, to my mild horror, fuel dripping out of the wing, but was assured it was nothing to worry about), we ran through a checklist and taxied out to the runway. "All right," the pilot said through the headset, over the roar of a propeller. "This is the air speed." He indicated a dial in the cockpit. "When that reaches about 65, pull back on the wheel."

He nodded, stunned. He wants me to take off? I thought. I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing! All the same, I did as he indicated, fruitlessly attempting to force down the butterflies in my stomach as we started down the runway. I was so focused on the air-speed indicator that I hardly noticed when the wheels left the tarmac. Then I looked out the window. I noticed that, all right: We were up in the air.

Freedom. That's the only way to describe the feeling. No, that can't be true, there are a million and one ways to describe it, but that's the best thing I can come up with. I know it sounds like a cliche, but it's completely and honestly true. I felt as though I could see everything and go anywhere. I live over 30 miles from Philadelphia, but I could see the collection of buildings clearly almost as soon as we were airborne. It looked so small in the grand scheme of things, just a tiny outcropping of buildings off by the horizon. I could see the local hospital, and my school, and the lake. It was kind of like looking at your house on Google Earth, except you're acctually there, 3,000 feet above it.

The feeling is nothing like flying in a commercial airliner; they're just not comparable. It's the difference between being in the space shuttle or in a space suit. It's the same view, but at the same time it's absolutely not. I looked out the window of that miracle of man-made machinery and saw the little town I call my home, which I've seen every time I looked out my window for the past 14 years. It looked surreal. And looking down on my familiar yet completely foreign hometown, I saw that the sky's not the limit. It's the launch pad.