Afghanistan Relief Operation 2001-2002

Ethiopian Airlift

Operation Lifeline Sudan

Operation Desert Shield / Desert Storm

Somalia Relief 1992-95

Africa Airdrop

Chevron Oil Project at Lake Kutubu - Papua New Guinea

USAF - Air Mobility Command "Turkey Trot"

International Red Cross Angola Relief

 

In all of the years that I was flying, I’ve never heard a cockpit conversation that began with the words: “I wish I worked in a bank.”  Pilots, as a general rule, do not buy books so that they may read about the lives of Bank Managers.  Bank Managers, on the other hand, have been known to cruise the aisles of their local bookshop or library searching for stories of the wild blue yonder and distant lands

For my part, I was born with a complete lack of natural curiosity.  I accept that the world is the way that it is and take for granted that it’s always been that way.  As a child I read of Whaling voyages and life at sea but never had any great desire to visit New Bedford or Nantucket though they were only a short ride away from my childhood home.  I read Kipling without dreaming of Mandalay or Rangoon and had no desire to see Paris in the springtime (an insurmountable bone of contention between a former girlfriend and me).  I’ve always just assumed that my ancestors got on those little wooden boats and sailed from England for a reason and that was good enough for me.  By nature I am probably best suited to be a cop or to drive a pick-up truck for some city’s public works department but for one thing: from the time I was five years old I’ve wanted to be a pilot.  Not because I wanted to go anywhere but because I wanted to fly.  It is the act of flying that appeals to me.  Yanking and banking brings me great joy but most especially I like to sit in my seat and look out the window upon a world that those who don’t fly will never know. 

There is romance in aviation of a kind best expressed by Antoine St Exupery in his reminiscences about flying the night mail in Francophone Africa, or by Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s writings of her aerial journeys with her husband or Beryl Markham’s poetic telling of tales about flying in British East Africa during the dying days of empire. 

They say that travel is broadening and I suppose that’s true in the same way that a liberal education is broadening.  Now when I read Kipling I know what the Khyber Pass looks like, I’ve followed the footsteps of Conan-Doyle down Baker Street and I’ve stood on the quarterdeck of an old whaling ship looking seaward.  I know the world more intimately than I, when younger, expected…or even wanted. I guess that’s a good thing but this broadened base of knowledge brings a burden as well.  I, like most Americans, used to think I knew all of the answers as to how other nations should organize their society, structure their government and run their economy even if I couldn’t find the places on a map.  Now I realize, after years spent living and working amidst other cultures, that not only do I not have any answers, I don’t even know the right questions to ask.  I now see that most of the prescriptions we Americanos offer are based upon hollow platitudes, faulty premises and false assumptions.  I am beginning to believe, after stepping through the wreckage of many civilizations, that societal success is as much a matter of luck as it is conscious planning.

Call me a romantic or maybe I’m just an anachronism, but I love airplanes with propellers and automobiles with cycle fenders and wire wheels.  I know that disk brakes are better and even the English have relented and put synchromesh on first gear.  But to understand the present you must first apprehend the past.  If you want to know why the world is the way that it is, you must first understand the way that it was. 

I never tire of St Ex’s memoirs about flying the night mail and life in the desert.  The job really hasn’t changed all that much since Antoine dropped his mail sacks at Legion outposts across the Sahara.  I’d like to think that we’re of a kind, Antoine and me.  I’d like to believe that we see the world from our aerial perch using the eyes of the poet and not the accountant.  I’ve flown big jets, Boeing 747s – the top of the pyramid - and if flying was just a way of earning a living I probably would have stayed with the jets.  But to me, flying is something more.  It is a calling.  It has a purpose beyond just making some money.  Since I was a child I dreamed of being a pilot and of doing great deeds with a flying machine.  It didn’t come easy and it didn’t come quick and it came with a price-tag attached.  Everything in life costs something and that price is proportional to how badly you want it.  If it’s important enough it costs: everything.  But if hold on to your dream and are willing to pay whatever price fate demands then one day your wish will be granted.  Be true to the dream and the dream will be true to you.  I was and one day I got my chance.