Flying on Christmas Day
December 31st, 2008Those of you that know me are probably, by this point, aware that I own an airplane. Furthermore, you’ve probably also figured out that I own an airplane is because my dad and I built one. This is a process that took nearly four years and, while it a great experience, was one that I do not recommend for the faint of heart or for those that are easily distracted. The last couple Christmases have been relaxing because dad and I have agreed to designated as an airplane day of rest - a day where not only do we not have to work on the airplane, but we also don’t have to feel badly about not working on it.
As a result of this entire airplane-building process, I’m used to having Christmas with airplane parts around - in the garage or in the hangar. This is the first year that the airplane parts have finished being transformed, as it were, into a functional airplane. I had an opportunity that I’ve never had before as a result, and that was the opportunity to fly on Christmas Day.
Up until now I’ve never really had the chance to do this. It didn’t work so well back when I was a student pilot - no flight instructor in their right mind is going to want to interrupt their Christmas day to spend it giving a flight lesson. If you fly rental planes, odds are that it’s not really going to work either. The places from which you rent the planes are - in my experience - never open on Christmas day, and even though there’s an emergency number that you can call after hours, the person that answers it is probably not going to want to interrupt their Christmas to drive out to the airport to unlock everything and hand you a set of airplane keys, either.
Consequently, about the only way to fly on Christmas is either if you own an airplane or if flying is your job.
Christmas morning had started off as a crystal clear day that - in this area of the country, anyway - generally only happens during the cooler months. Clear air is a seasonal thing in the southeast: most of the time, the humid summer months bring days that are full of haze. Although there’s the occasional clear summer afternoon, the only ones I can remember recently happened right after a thunderstorm blew through the area. Generally, pollen, smog, or whatever it is generally sticks around until well into fall, when the temperatures have dropped along with the humidity levels. This year, Christmas morning was - even though it was fairly balmy - the sort of crisp clear day on which you could see forever. Those of us that live down here (and fly down here, too, I suppose) look forward to these days.
All these sorts of ruminations, as you can imagine, were running through my head throughout the Christmas morning hubbub, during the chaos of wrapping paper and presents and lots of Christmas carols on the radio. Midway through the morning, I decided that it was a good time to head out to the airport for a bit of solitude and reflection. Well, solitude of a sort: I also took the opportunity to take my brother-in-law Arthur for his first ride in a small airplane.
The airport that I fly out of has no regularly scheduled airline traffic that flies into the airport, and most of the traffic that is there is in the form of students that are learning how to fly the rental Cessna 150’s and 172’s - normally they’re all out there scaring the runways, as a friend of mine puts it. Because none of that was going on, when we got to the airport, it was deserted. The folks in the FBO were gone, so the normal radio chatter wasn’t there. There was an inflatable Santa on the hangar roof sitting in an inflatable airplane with the inflatable propeller turning slowly, but there was no other sign of life.
This is the first time that Arthur has seen the plane since it was an airplane-shaped pile of parts, so I let them have some time to get acquainted while I checked the oil, gas, and all the other stuff that all flight instructors tell all student pilots to check. Eventually, we pulled the airplane out of the hangar, stuffed Arthur into the right seat, and blasted off into the blue.
I’ve found that passengers are nearly always more enthusiastic about seeing things from the air that they’ve seen from the ground, so we made a point of flying over all of the landmarks the Arthur would recognize. Huntsville is - surprisingly, perhaps - impressive from the air, and it’s possible to pick out quite a few landmarks. One of the most visible is the collection of rockets displayed outdoors at the Space and Rocket Center, (The Saturn V, specifically, is visible from nearly anywhere in the area), downtown is easily visible, and there are quite a few other Huntsville landmarks that - after as many tour flights as I’ve given - I’ve gotten pretty good at picking out.
To fly over all this stuff requires talking to the folks in the control tower at Huntsville International Airport. The controller that’s on duty today (not surprisingly) doesn’t sound all that busy - in fact, we end up talking to the same controller for the entire time we’re in the air. Normally, on a busier day, the job that he’s doing would be shared among multiple controllers. Today it’s just him. On the way back to Decatur we get vectored around an airliner climbing out of Huntsville, who is - thanks to the beautifully clear air - easily visible from a couple miles away. Other than that, the sky belongs to just us.
Flying in Alabama isn’t as senic as flying in, say, Colorado or New Mexico, but there are still some scenes that have the ability to be - quite literally - breathtaking. I’ve been flying on several days during the summer where - when you get to about 6,000 feet - you feel as if you’re flying through an enormous oil painting. The clouds are startlingly white and the blues are deep and vivid. Sunset or dusk flights are reliably nice, as is flying after dark, when you can see all the city lights below. I’ve had the opportunity to fly right after the summer thunderstorms have blasted through the vicinity, and the thin white wispy clouds that stay behind are the only visible remnants of the boiling gray thunderheads that have so rapidly departed. Other days there isn’t a cloud to be found, and the air is so clear that you feel like you can see everything until the earth annoyingly curves away. Probably the farthest that I’ve been able to see is one memorable day when I was able to see the Smoky Mountains when I was still in northeast Alabama. (I’m not making this up - typically, you can see up to the mountains that are in Tennessee around Chattanooga - the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. This is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the south-of-Knoxville Great Smoky Mountain National Park Smoky Mountains.) This was, of course, during one of those days when I left my camera behind.
Christmas - with its deserted skies and clear visibility - may not have been quite one of these days, but it was close enough to be wonderful, and like so many good views, it leads to a certain amount of introspective reflection:
At the time that I am writting this, the airplane that my dad and I built has been flying for just over 10 months and has during that time spent 95 hours in the air. During that time I have used it to give something like 20 different people rides, it has been upside down multiple times and travelled to (so far) six different states. What I’m only recently figuring out, though, is that a large part of what motivates me to go flying in the first place is the pursuit of these sort of previously mentioned breathtaking views - it’s an effort to encounter these situations with some degree of reliablity, really. At the very least, this provides some sort coherence with the other things I find that I like to do. On the surface, it would seem that backpacking or climbing up mountains wouldn’t have much to do with flying small planes, but this is the important aspect that they share: appreciating the beauty that is inherent in such situations that I regularly encounter while engaged in these activities is something of a spiritual experience.
C.S. Lewis discusses a related point in Miracles, and that is the idea that those that believe in the supernatural are the ones that are the most able to appreciate nature. The best way to appreciate something, Lewis says, is to understand it in contrast to what it’s not. According to Lewis, someone that speaks multiple languages can appreciate the Englishness of English in a way that someone who only speaks English won’t be able to understand. Likewise, if we believe treat nature as if it were God, or if it were everything that was, we lose, as Lewis puts it, “the whole pith and pleasure of her.” The supernatural aspect of the experience doesn’t keep us from appreciating nature, but rather gives us a way to appreciate nature in a more correct way because we’re able to see it from outside. Nature is to be greeted as a friend rather than being worshiped or being dismissed merely as something to exploit.
Christianity tells me that situations like this - the most beautiful views that we encounter, for example - are sent to us by God so that we can better understand who He is. God stands behind the beauty that we see in nature, as it were, telling us that what Has done - the part that we can see now - is just a pale shadow of who He is.
Me, I feel like right now I’ve been absorbing all the beauty that I can handle. A good view from a plane or from the right place in a national park can last for a few months, and the really good ones - Yosemite Valley at sunset, or the Grand Canyon after a thunderstorm - stick around forever.
Eventually, Arthur and I head back to the Decatur Airport, land, and then head back home. There are a few more gifts to give, a big dinner coming up, and a gingerbread house to build.