I’ve had the pleasure and sometimes the heavy responsibility of flying all sorts of aircraft during my career as a pilot; A wide variety of gas burners, high-wing fire spotters, sub-sonic cattle cars and fancy over-ocean pleasure barges. Except for slight differences in the pay I got for flying them, they were all the same. They got me in the sky.
Some pilots writing and talking to me over the years were caught up in the idea that size matters. They saw a “wow” factor in flying big jets that people who actually fly the big jets don’t. I’ve run into people (and hate mail) that is a sort of reverse envy. Because I flew big airplanes these people went out of their way to make me feel small. People who set out to make others look small just end up shrinking themselves so I haven’t paid that much attention to them.
I hope you’ll agree with me when I say that it really doesn’t matter how you get up in the sky as long as you do it. There is more beauty on some mornings flying a Champ at two hundred feet than flying a 777 at forty one thousand.
The important thing to remember, at least to me, is that our time in the air, piloting whatever we fly, is so damn short that we better enjoy it while we are there. My last thoughts on the subject of my flying life before I leave this earth won’t be that I should have bid captain on the 767 earlier, but perhaps I should have enjoyed those early morning sunrises in the Cessna 150 a little more.
A short time later, they were touring the U.S. and by a long chance, stayed at my parents' home in Madison, Wisconsin for a few days. Naturally, I dropped everything to go visit them.
These two spaceballs had been test pilots before they became cosmonauts, and collectively, they had flown every piece of heavy iron the Soviets then had in service. I was, at the time, a 200-hour Private Pilot and more than a little in awe of these guys.
Over dinner, that first evening, our conversation turned to airplanes (big surprise!). As the editor of CESSNA OWNER and PIPERS magazines, I had flown a handful of different light planes and, to my delight, the Russians peppered me with questions about my flying impressions of Cubs, Tomahawks, Comanches, and Skymasters.
When the subject turned to favorite airplanes, the responses were Super Cub for me and Gypsy Moth and Mooney for the Russians. For them, the heavy iron wasn't even in the running.
In 24 years of attending EAA's Oshkosh fly-in, I have never--NEVER--heard one pilot seriously denegrate another over what he or she flies. I've heard a lot of good natured teasing . . .
But at the end of the day, our shared experience of flight binds us much closer together than what you fly or what I fly could ever push us apart. That, too, is one of the joys of aviating.
--David Sakrison
<http://www.ChasingtheGhostBirds.com>
