A Flying Experience and Life Lesson

        

For as long as I can remember I’ve been mesmerized by soaring birds…and airplanes. 

Being a practical sort, I’ve also taken solace in the concept that pilots don’t usually die while they’re flying but when they stop flying.  

     Fifteen years ago, I almost did - just that!  I was taking off from a grass airfield in Upstate New York. I had a dacron and aluminum hang-glider with a motorcycle engine spinning a wooden prop a thousand times a minute. I had just taken off and was about fifty feet up when a wire connection broke and that screaming engine went silent in a microsecond. Any airplane with its nose up in the air will drop like an anvil if its forward momentum is not sufficient to provide enough lift to the wings.  I immediately yanked the control bar in pointing the nose toward the ground and maybe a second later threw the bar out to flare into a landing. The total “flight time” was probably 10 to 15 seconds.

     We’ve all heard of the “fight or flight” response.  Well, the above is what that looks like on a good day, when training, conditioning and divine intervention join forces to save someone's butt.  And we can ponder, what would have happened if I had even entered the “oh shit” phase?  A different outcome for sure. Sometimes in life there’s simply no time for fear or emotion to creep in. Fortunately, 99 percent of the time there is and we just have to work through it and then regroup. That’s the time when we’re supposed to reflect, deal with the “what ifs,” and then hopefully move on.  

     But what if we never move on to a recovery phase - where we step back and mechanically explore what worked or didn’t, and then weigh different corrective measures to minimize the chances that life would go sour in the future?  Sometimes we get so stuck in the emotional response to a situation that we end up residing there immersed in its paralysis.

      When we lose our objectivity or our ability to step outside our emotions to problem solve, we run the risk of fearing life itself and that could mean - 

                             NEVER FLYING AGAIN!