Richard Bach: A Gift of Wings

A picture burned in memory because it was wild and fun and shared.

“I remember the time John Purcell and I had to land my plane in a pasture in South Kansas because the weather got bad all at once. All we had for supper was a Hershey bar. We slept under the wing all night, and found some wild berries that we were afraid to eat for breakfast at sunup. And ol’ John saying my airplane made a lousy hotel because some rain got him wet. He’ll never know how close I came to taking off and just leaving him out there in the middle of nowhere, for a while…”

Journeys across the middle of Nowhere.

“I remember the sky over Scottsbluff. The clouds must have gone up ten miles over our head. We felt like darn ants, I tell you…”

Adventures in a country of giants.

“What do I remember? I remember this morning! Bill Carran bet me a nickel he could take off in his Champ in less runway than I’d need in the T-Craft. And I lose, and I can’t figure out why I lose because I always win with that guy, and just when I go to pay him I see he’s snuck a sandbag into my airplane! So he had to pay me a nickel for cheating and another nickel for losing the takeoff when we did it again with the sandbag out…”

Games of skill, with sneaky tricks unplayed since childhood.

“What do I remember? What don’t I remember! But I’m not about to go back and live it over. Too much still to do now.” And an engine starts and the man is gone, dwindling down to nothing against the horizon.

You reach a point, I found, where you begin to know that a pilot does not fly airplanes in order to get somewhere, although he gets to many somewheres indeed.

He doesn’t fly to save time, although he saves that whenever he steps from his automobile into his airplane.

He doesn’t fly for the sake of his children’s education, although the best geographers and historians in class are those who have seen the world and its history in their own eyes, from a private airplane.

He doesn’t fly for economy, although a small used aircraft costs less to buy and run than a big new car.

He doesn’t fly for profit or business gain, although he took the plane to fly Mr. Robert Ellison himself out for lunch and a round of golf and back again in time for the board meeting, and so the Ellison account was sold.

All of these things, so often given as reasons to fly, aren’t reasons at all. They’re nice, of course, but they are only by-products of the one real reason. That one reason is the finding of life itself, and the living of it in the present.

If the by-products were the only purpose for flight, most of today’s airplanes would never have been built, for there are a multitude of annoyances cluttering the path of the lightplane pilot, and the annoyances are acceptable only when the rewards of flight are somewhat greater than a minute saved.

A lightplane is not quite so certain a piece of transportation as an automobile. In poor weather, it is not uncommon to be held for hours, days sometimes, on the ground. If an owner keeps his airplane tied down on the airport grass, he worries with every windstorm and scans every cloud for hail, much as if his airplane were his wife, waiting out in the open. If he keeps his plane in a large hangar, he worries about hangar fires, and thoughtless line-boys smashing other aircraft into his own.

Only when the plane is locked away in a private hangar is the owner’s mind at rest, and private hangars, especially near cities, cost more to own than does the airplane itself.

Flying is one of the few popular sports in which the penalty for a bad mistake is death. At first, that seems a horrible and shocking thing, and the public is horrified and shocked when a pilot is killed committing an unforgivable error. But such are the terms that flying lays down for pilots: Love me and know me and you shall be blessed with great joy. Love me not, know me not, and you are asking for real trouble.

The facts are very simple. The man who flies is responsible for his own destiny. The accident that could not have been avoided through the action of the pilot is just about nonexistent. In the air, there is no equivalent of the child running suddenly from between parked cars. The safety of a pilot rests in his own hands.

Explaining to a thunderstorm for instance, “Honest, clouds and rain, I just want to go another twenty miles and then I promise to land,” is not much help. The only thing that keeps a man out of a storm is his own decision not to enter it, his own hands turning the airplane back to clear air, his own skill taking him back to a safe landing.

No one on the ground is able to do his flying for him, however much that one may wish to help. Flight remains the world of the individual, where he decides to accept responsibility for his action or he stays on the ground. Refuse to accept responsibility in flight and you do not have very long to live.

There is much of this talk of life and death, among pilots. “I’m not going to die of old age,” said one, “I’m going to die in an airplane.” As simple as that. Life, without flight, isn’t worth living. Don’t be startled at the number of pilots who believe that little credo; a year from now you could be one of them, yourself.

What determines whether you should fly, then, is not your business requirement for an airplane, not your desire for a challenging new sport. It is what you wish to gain from life. If you wish a world where your destiny rests completely in your own hands, chances are that you’re a natural-born pilot.

Don’t forget that “Why fly?” has nothing to do with aircraft. It has nothing to do with by-products, the “reasons” so often put forth in those pamphlets to potential buyers. If you find that you are a person who can love to fly, you will find a place to come whenever you tire of a world of TV dinners and people cut from cardboard. You will find people alive and adventures alive and you will learn to see a meaning behind it all.

The more I wander around airports across the country, the more I see that the reason most pilots fly is simply that thing they call life.

Give yourself this simple test, please, and answer these simple questions:

How many places can you now turn when you have had enough of empty chatter?

How many memorable, real events have happened in your life over the last ten years?

To how many people have you been a true and honest friend—and how many people are true and honest friends of yours?

If your answer to all these is “Plenty!” then you needn’t bother with learning to fly.

But if your answer is “Not very many,” then it just might be worth your while to stop by some little airport one day and walk around the place and find what it feels like to sit in the cockpit of a light airplane.

I still think of my salesman acquaintance of the airline flight between San Francisco and Denver. He had despaired of ever finding again the taste of life, at the very moment that he moved through the sky that offers it to him.

I should have said something to him. I should at least have told him of that special high place where a few hundred thousand people around the world have found answers to emptiness.

Open cockpits, flying boots, and goggles are gone. Stylized cabins, air conditioners, and sun-shaded windshields are here. I had read and heard this thought for a long time, but all of a sudden it sank in with a finality that was disturbing. We have to admit to the increased comfort and all-weather abilities of modern lightplanes, but are these the only criteria for flying enjoyment?