Learning to Fly: Preamble
Since our trips to visit all 92 counties is a long, slow process, I thought I’d intermix some other interesting blog posts along the way. I took my personal blog down a couple of years ago after nearly 7 years of blogging, so this will be a good creative outlet in the meantime.
Astute readers of this blog may note that we travel to some of our destinations by our own airplane. Throughout the next couple of blog posts, I’ll explain a little bit about how that whole thing came about.
I never really had grand aspirations of flying or learning to fly. Commercial flying was something I tolerated, but never particularly cared for. In fact, there was a period of time in my life just a few years ago where I took some prescription relaxation medication before flights because of anxiety. I don’t know where that came from, and it went away over time, but needless to say, I wasn’t a huge fan of it.
It’s hard to describe exactly what myself (and others) have a fear of. I think the most logical thing feared is something going wrong and plummeting out of the sky. The fact that you have no control over the situation doesn’t help. Yet, if you are a passenger in the back seat of a car, you have no control over what the driver does.
And yet, we all know the statistic that “flying is safer than driving”. But flying is such an unnatural feel for us, and some of us just never get over that.
Something different
The whole path-to-flight for me started in April 2010. For the few years prior, I had spent all of my free/hobby time working on various projects or hobbies, but they were all in the same industry I work (computer/IT/engineering). That is, all of my side projects and hobbies were pretty much intertwined. The problem was, it was overwhelming, and some nights it was hard to sleep. I was so involved in my work, my hobbies, my projects – I just didn’t have anything to get me away from it.
The idea of flying came to me as something that was so radically different, and outside my normal comfort zone, that it instantly appealed to something way inside my head. Outwardly, I was skeptical and quite nervous. I didn’t think I would enjoy it.
Luckily, I am close with someone who had gone through the whole process of learning to fly a few years ago, and was able to ask some questions and get advice. I also worked pretty closely with someone who was a flight instructor, and had over 15,000 hours of flying time over the past 50 or so years.
So we formed a plan. I would go on my first discovery flight at the Columbus airport in a Cessna 172 that the local flight school maintains for instruction purposes. I could then decide how I wanted to proceed. At this point, I still didn’t even know what the requirements were, how long it would take, how much it would cost, etc. I just wanted to get this first flight done.
Internally I was telling myself, before ever going to the airport, that I would probably not be back, because it just wasn’t fun for me.