The Wild Blue Yonder
How do you describe Flight? Freedom? Joy? Exhiliration? Well,it's all of those things....and yet those words don't begin even to describe what flight is really all about.
Ask any pilot to describe flying and most will be at a loss for words. Because the truth is that he can't really tell you what flight is all about....He can only take you up into the sky itself, and show you....the sun, the clouds, and the Wild Blue....
Some people feel that the romance of flight is dead, that flying is nothing more than bad meals, shrinking seats and lost luggage. But they are wrong. The dream is still alive, because all flight is miraculous.
The kid at the airport fence knows it; the student pilot roaring down an empty runway on his first solo,understands; so does the Instrument pilot who plays a game of magnetic pinball with the clouds, betting his life against his skill; the aerobatic competitor slicing the sky with the deftness of a surgeon knows it, and so does the Boeing Captain who sweats it out to make it all look so simple; the attack pilot barreling into his target at high subsonic speed, and the fighter jock sliding into his prey's six o'clock, they all know it.
Mere words cannot describe flight. One man may be a military aviator, on flight orders with a military commission,riding forty thousand pounds of dry thrust at twice the speed of sound, protected by inch thick plexiglass and an artificial atmosphere within his cockpit. Another may be a recreational pilot, on the orders of his heart alone, in a tiny ultralight built with his own hands, travelling at a hundred kilometres an hour and protected from the wind by an eighth-inch of glass and a pair of goggles.
Seems like a world of difference, right? But the feeling in their hearts is the same. For soaring high above the earth, a man is finally set free, breaking all bonds. He is finally alone, surrounded only by the wind, the clouds, and the sky. You can change the ground, tear out the grass, fill in a pond, level a hill and build a city on it. But tear out the wind? Cover a cloud in concrete? Sculpt the sky to suit your wishes? Impossible. The wind, the sky and the clouds are the eternal elements, nature's common denominators. They are constant....yet everchanging.
And therein lies the true joy of aviation. No flight is the same. There are always new challenges to be faced and new aspects to explore. And that is why humans will always want to strap themselves into an aeroplane, and take to the the wild blue yonder, pushing the limits of flight and striving to go faster, higher, and farther than ever before.
Perhaps it's those wise old pelicans who have seen wood and canvas, become a tower of technology, soaring from the sands of Kitty Hawk to the moon, who understand the feeling best of all, even if they find it hard to say the words, "All flight is miraculous....."
Saurabh Lall
