On Flying (a Plane)
Photo: I stand next to the Cessna 172 at Hanscom Airfield that I’m about to fly. I’m totally pretending I’m not nervous!
On a Thursday in June 2023, I drive to Hanscom Field in Bedford, MA. I’ve scheduled myself to take a flying lesson. I’m nervous. I feel fully present in the way I do when I’m doing something scary. I’m aware of every tiny gurgle in my stomach.
The lesson has already been rescheduled once because the instructor wasn’t available, and I wonder if the weather will ground me today. It’s been raining for nearly a week, with thunderstorms and low clouds hovering over Massachusetts, and although the rain has stopped this morning, the weather seems touch and go. When I arrive at the flight school, the chatter in the small office is all about the weather. The cloud cover is around fifteen hundred feet, which is on the edge of being too low, because small planes must stay below two thousand feet.
I feel a hint of disappointment. I realize that I don’t want this lesson to be canceled.
When my instructor, Galden, arrives, he tells me that the weather might not be good enough, especially because it’s my first lesson. I can tell he doesn’t want me to have a bad experience. I’m also different from most of the other students, who seem to be primarily teen boys and young men. I’m a middle-aged Asian woman who is, admittedly, much more comfortable reading a book in an armchair than doing risky things like flying planes.
I tell him I’m a writer, and I’m taking this lesson for research purposes.
“So you want the experience,” he says.
“Yes,” I say, even though at that moment my body is telling me no, you don’t want the experience, stay on the ground!
We decide to go through the preflight checklist, which will take about half an hour, and then see if the weather is good enough to go up. I know that several of those teen boys have already gone up, and I wonder if Galden is going to gauge how freaked out I look while doing the preflight checklist before he decides if I can handle it, too.
We walk out onto the tarmac toward a Cessna 172. This is a single-engine plane often used to teach pilots how to fly. It’s small and narrow, and the wings are low enough that even though I’m short, I have to take care not to hit my head as I duck beneath them to open the door to the cockpit. Inside is a narrow, cramped space that holds two front seats, a tiny backseat, and an instrument panel bristling with gauges and switches and radios and displays.
The preflight checklist is long and involves checking all of those gauges and switches and radios and displays, as well as doing a visual inspection of the exterior of the plane to make sure that everything looks right. I have no idea what I’m looking for, but I attempt to keep up as Galden leads me around the plane and explains how the rudder on the tail turns the plane on the ground, how the flaps on the wings work, how the ailerons will turn the plane in the air.
One of the preflight tasks is to extract a small amount of fuel from each of the tanks (there is one on each wing) and inspect it to make sure it’s the right color: a clear blue. Galden tests one of the fuel tanks, then hands me the fuel bottle to test the other one. At first I can’t even remember where to insert the tiny nozzle. I spill some fuel on my hand, but it evaporates almost instantly, smelling sharply of gasoline. It’s the right color. Next, I have to climb onto the wing using a small metal step so that I can pour the extracted fuel back in the tank. There is a handhold up high, and I have to juggle the bottle with that hand while I use my other hand to pull myself up with the edge of the wing, which is smooth and rounded and not very easy to hold onto. I have a vision of myself tumbling off that step and face-planting onto the tarmac, thus ending my flight even before I’ve taken off. But I tell myself to just do it, this is not the time to feel afraid—and I do it.
Galden jokes that the first test of whether someone can be a pilot is if they can successfully test the fuel. Thankfully, I’ve passed it.
*
We climb into the cockpit. It’s so small that Galden and I will bump elbows if we’re not careful. At the same time, I have to crank my seat all the way up front so that the tips of my toes can reach the rudder pedals. Planes, I realize, are not traditionally built for comfort. This is a complex machine that has to fit many body sizes, and the most important thing is being able to see the instruments clearly, not a cushy seat.
We continue with the preflight checklist, which involves checking the switches and gauges, learning how to open and shut the door and window, adjusting my seat and shoulder belts, putting on the headset. It clamps tightly over my ears and immediately causes my head to ache, but there are so many other things happening that I can’t fixate on the pain. Galden finds the weather report on the radio and concludes that it’s safe for us to go up. I don’t object, and Galden tells me to put the key in the ignition and turn the engine on. The propeller whirs into life.
Even taxiing across the tarmac toward the runway is overwhelming. You steer the plane with your feet, pressing down with the toes of your left foot to turn left, and the toes of your right foot to turn right. But I can’t get the hang of it, and I feel like my body is the wrong length for this. I feel too short, and decades of driving cars has made me cautious about pressing pedals unreservedly, even though the plane’s pedals don’t control the power. The power is controlled by the throttle, a knob on a stick that’s operated by hand. Again, decades of driving trip me up. When driving a car, you push forward to increase the gas; with a throttle, pushing forward decreases the power, and pulling it out increases it. When Galden tells me to “pull out on the throttle” I can do it, but if he doesn’t cue the direction, I instinctively wanted to do the opposite of what I should.
After I clumsily steer the plane toward the runway (I’m sure Galden helped), it’s time to take off. Galden communicates with the control tower in pilots’ lingo that I don’t understand. I don’t understand most of what’s happening, even though I’m trying very hard to pay attention.
Before my lesson, I researched aviation, and one phrase that came up over and over was situational awareness. A pilot needs to develop this ability to be aware of what’s going on all around them: the traffic on the runway (or in the air), communication over the radio, whatever the instruments are reading. They control the plane with both their hands and their feet, but their brain also has to be actively assessing the situation at all times. It’s a lot to take in, and I can tell that my situational awareness is low because everything is unfamiliar and it’s hard for me to do more than one thing at a time. Thankfully, Galden knows what he’s doing.
He tells me to pull out the throttle to bring the plane to full power. It’s time to take off. The engine immediately roars; I feel the power building as the plane accelerates. When instructed, I pulled back on the yoke—this is like the steering wheel of a car—and because I can’t really see over the instrument panel (again: short!), I’m not aware of when we actually lift off. But when I look over my left shoulder out the window, the ground is dropping away below us. I see the runway, the roof of the airport, and we’re rising up into the cloud-patched blue sky.
To my surprise, it feels exactly like taking off in a commercial airplane. I wondered if it would be bumpier or louder or feel more dangerous, but this feels almost exactly like every time I’ve taken off in a jet. This time, however, the ground falls away a bit more slowly because we aren’t flying as fast. And this time, my hands are on the controls.
I had been worried that I would feel airsick in the small plane, but there is so much to do that I rarely have time to be aware of my body at all. Even though my head aches because of the headset and my stomach feels a little uncertain, I can’t pay attention to those physical sensations; I have to pay attention to the horizon.
Photo: I’m flying the Cessna 172! Look at the ground through the windows: this is real! Also I swear I’m not gripping the yoke as tightly as it looks 😅
I learn how to turn the plane with the yoke, which maneuvers the ailerons on wings, which controls the direction of the plane. Push the yoke to the right and the plane turns to the right; push the yoke to the left, and it goes to the left—except there’s a slight delay, because the ailerons take a second to move, and then it takes a second for the angle of attack (the angle between the wind and the wing) to change, thus causing the plane to turn. I learn that turning the yoke too far in one direction will cause the angle of the plane to turn too steeply, because after all, we are not turning on the ground. We are turning in the air. The entire plane tilts when I turn right or left.
“Is there a particular angle I should keep the plane at when turning?” I ask.
Galden tells me to try to keep it around fifteen degrees, which I can see on the attitude indicator in front of me. This is the instrument that’s easiest to read, because it has a little picture of a plane on a horizon, and the little plane mirrors the angle of the real plane. I fly toward a small cloud in the sky, trying to keep the nose of the plane level at about two to three fingers below the horizon. There’s a lake in the distance on the left, and I start to turn toward it carefully, trying to nudge the yoke gently while keeping the plane at fifteen degrees to the horizon.
Galden points out another plane in the distance, as well as landmarks on the ground. He tells me it’s a good idea to scan from one thing to another in a constant cycle. I wonder how many times I’d have to fly a plane before it becomes possible for me to focus on anything more than steering.
I fly the Cessna in big circles. The sky surrounds us. From the ground, the sky looks open and empty, but up here it feels close; the air feels solid and alive. I have to continually nudge the yoke to keep the plane level, responding to the push of the air against the wings. To my surprise, flying the plane feels quite safe. Because I have my hands on the yoke, I can feel the way the air is lifting us up. It feels like the plane wants to fly.
After I’ve made several big circles and am getting the hang of keeping the plane level, Galden asks if I want to experience a stall. This is what happens when the engine stops, potentially leading the plane to plummet through the air to crash into the ground. I should probably be afraid of this, but by this time I can’t understand how I feel anymore. My attention has been so tightly focused on trying to understand what I’m doing that I don’t really know if I’m afraid. So I say yes, let’s do it.
Galden tells me when to push in the throttle to power down, causing us to fly more slowly. The propeller, which has been spinning so fast that I can see right through it, slows enough that I can see the blade. And then Galden tells me to cut the power completely. I push in the throttle, and the engine goes quiet. The plane drops for a moment and my stomach drops too, but at the same time, the silence is profoundly peaceful. I pull up on the yoke as instructed, and the nose of the plane rises. Now we’re gliding. Other than the initial drop, there is no sensation of falling. The air feels more solid than ever.
And then Galden tells me to pull the throttle out again—quickly now—and the engine roars to life, the propeller whirring into invisibility once more, and the plane thrusts forward. I’m aware of the growing nausea in my stomach now, and when I tell Galden I’m feeling queasy, he opens the vents. Fresh air floods into the cabin, and I gulp it in. It helps.
*
By the time we’re ready land, I’m mentally drained. The headache from the headset has gotten worse. I managed to ignore it for most of the flight, but as I tire the pain starts to push through my focus. My body is trying to assert itself over my brain, and I have a sensation of wrestling back control. Not yet, I tell myself.
“You’re going to land this thing, right?” I say, half joking but mostly serious.
“We’ll land it together,” Galden says.
But I don’t do much; I watch as he guides the plane down the center of the runway, letting it touch down. He has to pull back on the yoke while braking, using both hands and feet in a maneuver that looks difficult to me. And then I have to use the rudder pedals again to attempt to steer the plane on the ground. (I’m marginally better than before we lifted off.)
After Galden parks the plane (who am I kidding, I couldn’t have steered that plane into the right spot), I climb out onto the tarmac. I feel queasy, exhilarated, and exhausted. All I did was turn the plane in circles and keep it level; Galden took care of everything else, from paying attention to the instruments and air traffic to communicating with the tower and landing the plane. He doesn’t seem tired at all, but I feel completely emptied.
After doing the post flight checklist, we walk back toward the terminal, and Galden asks me how I felt about the stall. To my surprise I say, “It was actually kind of fun. My stomach didn’t like it, though. How do you deal with that? Do you just get used to it?”
He nods quickly. “You get used to it.”
That’s how it works. All the gauges and radios and switches and displays—you get used to it. Tracking your eyes across the instruments, to the horizon, out the window to look for any air traffic, and then back again: you get used it. I imagine that as you train your brain to stay aware of so many different bits of information at the same time, your body will also get used to it. Even after one hour in the air, I had already started to get used to the feel of steering the plane with the yoke, taking the delay into account, incorporating vertical motion with each turn. I imagine that after you’ve gotten used to it, you’ll be able to spend more time enjoying the sensation of being held in the sky. I wish I’d been able to do that, but I was so busy focusing on what I was doing that I couldn’t really enjoy the view.
In the car on the way home, my head pounds and my stomach still feels a bit off. But compared to flying the plane, driving the car on the ground seems as easy as walking. The road feels especially smooth, making me wonder just how bumpy the air actually had been. I understand the way car traffic moves almost instinctively, because I’ve gotten used to it through decades of driving.
Flying is not much like writing a novel, but one element is similar. In writing, there are no instruments to be aware of, but you still have to develop a kind of situational awareness, especially when writing a long novel. There’s no tachometer or attitude indicator, but you do have to keep all the characters in mind, their emotions, the setting, the trajectory of the plot, and how all of these elements intersect and affect each other. This can be overwhelming for a beginning writer. Even if you’re an experienced writer, it can be overwhelming at the beginning of a new novel.
The difference between a beginning writer and an experienced one is that the experienced writer has gotten used to it: the mass of details and questions and themes that can make writing seem impossible because there are so many options. How do you choose what to do? This can cause a writer to freeze. But with experience, you learn how to take all of those factors—a character’s emotion, the setting, the plot—and deploy them to write one sentence, and the next, and the next. You learn how to have a situational awareness of where you are in your novel, what came before this scene and what will come next.
Flying a plane is not much like writing a novel, but I think that learning how to fly is a bit like learning how to write. It takes practice and focus. And if your stomach gets queasy or your head pounds because you can’t figure out what to do, you go back to that page over and over again, until you get used to it. 🛩️
This essay was originally published in my newsletter, Lo & Behold. If you’d like to receive my essays in your in box before they’re posted to the public, subscribe below: