The Pondering Absurdist

… was a movie released in 2004, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring every girl at the time’s dream boy, Leonardo DiCaprio. It was a biopic about billionaire Howard Hughes and his interest in aviation. There was another movie with the same title, but a different plot line, that starred Christopher Reeve (of Superman fame) and Rosanna Arquette, released in 1985… and an even older one, a rom-com, from 1929. I can comfortably admit that I did not personally star or appear in any of these movies.

My interest in aviation and flying machines, however, started at a very young age. We lived near a US Air Force Base when I was just starting in elementary school. I can remember being able to look up in the sky from the school playground during recess and see military airplanes on their final approach toward the runway. It wasn’t long before I could name almost every plane I saw that flew by. If I didn’t know it, I would look it up (in a book… this was long before the Internet, my friends) for the next time I saw it. “Look John,” I would say to my friend, “there’s a Lockheed Constellation…” or, “wow, there’s an F-106 Delta Dart!” My goal, even at that early age, was to someday become a pilot and fly airplanes myself.

After my parents forced us into the mind-numbing guilt trip that is the Seventh-day Adventist religion/church, everything became about “God” and “the second coming of Jesus” (which was happening “any day now” in the 1970s). Secular things like airplanes and flying became non-important. After a few years in the church and seeing that we were all still here on Earth, things started to chill out a bit (slightly), and I was able to let aircraft and flying back into my mind again. I was in “high school” (Adventists called it “Academy”) by then. I found a couple of friends in the class above me (I was a freshman, and they were sophomores) who also shared an interest in airplanes. They would share model airplane magazines with me, and one of them had a radio-controlled glider. We would occasionally get together after school hours and I would get to watch him fly it. Since my family was now a single-income family paying 10 percent of their income to the church, our financial situation wasn’t such that they could afford to pay for flying lessons for me (they wouldn’t anyway, because of the whole, you know…, “Jesus is coming soon” thing, and flying is unimportant). They did, however, indulge my desire to be like my friends and allowed me to buy an inexpensive radio-controlled glider kit and all the necessary accoutrements to make it a flyable machine. I was actually able to enjoy a part of my life again as I built my kit and started to fly it. Shockingly, my parents even allowed me to buy a few aircraft-related books. By the time I was nearing the end of high school, I had it in my mind that I wanted to become an aeronautical engineer, and I started researching that career field. Again though, sadly, the church had been the main focus of my parents’ life since my early teens, and the family income/financial stability situation was not the best. My parents had not set any money aside for college education(s) for me and/or my younger brother. I was not encouraged to work outside the home during high school, or encouraged to pursue any grants or scholarships. Why should I?… we were all going to be whisked away to “heaven” in the near future and earthly things wouldn’t matter. Needless to say, I did not go to college and I did not become an aeronautical engineer. The other two friends of mine from high school both did something in the aviation field after high school. One of them joined the military and became a helicopter mechanic, and the last time I Googled him, the other had become an airline pilot. I, instead, followed in my father’s footsteps and joined the US Navy after high school, going into the field of electronics.

Over the years, I never lost my interest in aviation. As an adult I kept buying and building radio-controlled glider kits, both before and after I finally wised up and left the church in my rear-view mirror. Since I didn’t go to college and get a Bachelor’s degree in “anything,” my career path has been of the “I’ll never see six-figures in my lifetime” type. I made enough money to live comfortably, but not enough to afford or justify spending a lot of money extra on flying lessons.

(a rare view into my personal life here, one that has absolutely nothing to do with aviation) I’m positive that the experiences during my childhood and teen years in the church screwed me up in the head a bit where it comes to humans of the female persuasion. Premarital sex was a sin… masturbation was, a sin… thinking about girls in any way other than Jesus might… well, you probably get the picture. As a result, though I LOVE women and usually place them above all on the proverbial pedestal, I’ve never been in a relationship over 7 years for one reason or another. I have an oft-repeated “joke,” (sadly, not a joke) that I never dated women, I just married them. As a result, most of my failed long-term relationships have actually ended in divorces, rather than just breaking up. There is never any violence, no animosity, and I usually remain friends with them after the divorce, at least for a while (until we lose touch). Keep all this in mind and please don’t be shocked when I mention my “fourth wife” in the next paragraph. (okay, end personal exposé and back to the main feature)

My first three wives were like me, sans Bachelor’s degree, and they made similar amounts of money as I did, within their chosen career fields. When it came to divorce, it was an easy split of assets with no children and no spousal support in either partner’s future. My fourth wife, however, was/is a PhD. She is (or was… there’s that “losing touch” thing) a medical writer with a degree in neuroscience. She actually wrote about Viagra for Pfizer at one point, and that was amusing to “poke fun” about. As such, she made about twice as much money in her chosen career path as I did. It was never an issue between us, and I just saw it as an extra financial “cushion” when we decided that one or the other of us wanted to do or buy something that I previously would have balked about in other marriages. She was usually the one who spent more money than I, and rightly so. I’m getting to the point soon, really, I am. At one point in our marriage, I mentioned in passing that I had always wanted to learn to fly. She suggested that I should take flying lessons. We discussed it “for reals” and I began the necessary research.

In 2004 I bought the “ground school” books to learn the basics for when I needed to pass the test. I bought some videos on DVD of flight instruction. Lastly, I took my “Discovery Flight” at a local airport in Pennsylvania, near where my wife and I were living at the time, and signed up with the flight instructor. The first thing that was determined was that I needed to take my lessons in a bigger plane. I am of Viking descent, and built a little bit like one, at 6′ tall and about 235 pounds. When flying, it’s all about the amount of weight a plane can carry comfortably, and apparently the Piper Tomahawk used on the Discovery flight was a little too much of a “light plane” for both me and the instructor combined. I was told that I needed to fly the airport’s Piper Archer II instead of the Tomahawk for all my future flights (such as they were).

My first flight in the “left seat” was about learning how to taxi on the ground (including using the brakes to stop the plane), using the throttle to accelerate down the runway and get the plane up into the air, fly a couple of gentle circuits around the airport, and get the plane back down on the ground again without dying in the process. It’s been over 20 years now, so some of my memories are a little bit vague, but I might have done a couple of touch-and-go procedures, where you land briefly then take off immediately again. I do remember that when we came in to do the last landing we encountered some wind shear on final approach and the entire plane banked quickly to one side, scaring the bejesus out of both me and the instructor. The instructor immediately took the yoke, corrected, and proceeded to land the plane. The second lesson was more memorable for me, as it included some “stall” training, where you angle the nose up until the plane loses lift, then the nose takes a sudden dive and you learn how to recover from it. After a couple of those my stomach wasn’t having it, so I threw up in the cockpit, all over the instrument panel. The instructor again took control and returned us to the airport to land the plane. After the lesson, I had to do my best to clean up the mess I had made in the cockpit. After that I thought long and hard about whether or not I wanted to continue with flying lessons and become a pilot. I finally decided to abandon my dream of becoming a real pilot and just stick to flying planes via radio-control from the ground. My flight log book ended with a total of about 5 hours of flying time.

I should have known right from the start, that being a pilot and flying wasn’t the life for me. After all, it was me as a child who begged my parents to pull the car over about every half hour when we drove in the Sierra Nevada mountains or on the coast road (California Hwy 1)… just so that I could open the door and vomit. It was me, again, who stupidly joined the US Navy after my childhood history of puking on the side of the road. Being assigned to a small ship that went out to sea every couple of weeks wasn’t the most fun. I painted the porcelain gods in the head (bathroom, for you land-lubbers) on my ship several times with my meals from the mess hall. Motion sickness has always been my nemesis. It’s gotten a little better as I’ve aged, but I don’t think it’s completely out of my system. Maybe I just learned to stop doing things that cause it.

Though my dream was crushed by my body’s apparent physical limitation, I have never lost my interest in aviation, aircraft, space travel, and the like. When humans decide to break new barriers or boundaries in aviation, I’m right there watching along. If I hear a plane flying overhead, I will usually look up in the sky to find it. That is why I threw up my last post so quickly, in case any other aviation enthusiasts were reading (who am I kidding… I can probably count on two hands the number of people who have visited the pages within this web address that I paid for). I have been following the progress of Boom Supersonic for a few years now, and I knew that they were going to be live streaming their first flight over the speed of sound (Mach 1), I just didn’t think about mentioning it here until practically the last minute. I’m pretty sure that they will be the first company to produce a new viable commercial aircraft that will fly supersonic since the Concorde was grounded over 20 years ago, in 2003. They have done it as a private company, not funded by any government (like the Concorde was, and Russia’s Tu-144 “Concordski”). Boom is not even a publicly traded company (otherwise I would currently own some of their stock). Their engineering department is borrowing some “concepts” from other previous supersonic planes, but building and designing their own machines, including a brand new engine designed specifically for their own future supersonic airliner, the Overture. This company has an exciting future, mark my words.

If I keep this blogging thing up long enough, you’ll probably see more posts about aviation in the future. Until then…

PA