Most of what thrills me about being up in a plane is visual. There’s a perspective, which I often have in my mind when I am on the ground, that I finally get to see in reality when I fly. There are other pilots of the same plane who complain that eventually the great visibility is a liability because you roast in the sun. I don’t care, I just want to see more. If I could, I would have the entire cockpit Plexiglas, including the floor. (Helicopters are like that, huge globes of visibility that you float through the sky in. I would be more interested in learning to fly helicopters if they weren’t twice as expensive and twice as fragile.) Click to continue »

Scope

The proper way to manage risks is to look at the larger risks and eliminate those first. Eventually, you get far enough down the list that you get to negligible risks. That is not the way typical Americans handle risks. We consider handguns dangerous (there are ad campaigns to “keep guns away from your children”), when the truth is that unless you are involved in the drug trade or live in an area where it is happening, your chance of being hurt or killed by a gun is a lot lower than your chance of slipping in the shower and heading to the emergency room. Regardless, people worry about guns and not about those clever non-slip flower decals you can put on your tub. Click to continue »

The night I returned from Las Vegas I had a dream about flying. I woke up from it sad (it was like that). It took me a while to fall back to sleep and while lying there I remembered the dream over and over. The next day I wrote it all down. I tried not to add to it, but dreams are difficult to tell. It feels like they happen all at once, and then your sleeping mind slowly unravels them, editing and embellishing where necessary as it tells the dream to the rest of your mind.

Most people are here to read about flying, but there’s only a little flying in this. As Nell said, “Well, it’s sort of depressing and since it’s a dream it’s not really a short story in the usual sense.” Exactly. But I like having somewhere to paste it in.