It's Not the Fall That Kills You

Adjective Queen's latest flight of fancy brought to mind some portion of my own youth. I wanted to fly, but I didn't necessarily want to join the Air Force. I was pretty sure I wanted to be a sniper, preferably a paratrooper/sniper, but a Marine LRRP sniper or Thirteen Cent Killer would've been fine. And then after I retired I was going to do freelance work. So, no Air Force for me. I realize that's a long way from being a librarian, but that's another post.

Our cult had two pilots in it and I naturally gravitated to them. One was an ex-Marine aviator who flew corporate lear jets. It wasn't unusual for him to be gone to the Orange Bowl or the Super Bowl or Hawaii, but mostly he was taking oilmen to meetings in Houston and back. The other guy was also a corporate pilot, but he flew turboprops and those were fun. He was also more of a pretty hang-loose guy - probably had a lot to do with with the 3 or 4 million dollar difference in the prices of their planes. When I was about Lego's age, I acted eager enough to learn that the second guy took me under his wing, so to speak. He gave me the flight manuals and the ground school coursework and told me if I could sit in the cockpit and 'fly' the plane in the hangar, he'd let me do it for real and help me get a license. So I studied them. I learned about pitch and yaw and lift and drag and at 14 I actually passed the ground school portion of the licensing process. I was so ready to fly for real.

And then the ol' family curse reared its ugly head. Actually, we have three family curses. One is that any time I was about to embark on some great endeavor, we would have to move. Another one is that any time I wanted to do something fun (i.e. dangerous), my mother's fear factor kicked in and I usually lost out. The last one, the big one, is the Male Transportation Curse. My aviation career was cut short by a perfect storm of all three of these. By way of explanation, the Male Transportation Curse involves the fact that all the men in my direct line of ancestry have died young via some form of transportation accident. My dad is the death cheater, the Ronald Reagan of the Transportation Curse. I hope he broke it anyway.

Here's how the curse plays out in reverse order: one of my dad's stepbrothers died in a car wreck in Montana, the other died in a plane crash in Kansas. My dad's brother died when the parachute of his dragster failed to deploy during a race.



My dad's father was killed in New Mexico when his car was run off the road in the desert in a hit by the Mexican version of the mafia. His brother, my dad's uncle was killed near Reno, in a hit by some sort of organized crime outfit in Nevada. And various male ancestors died in the pre-car age after being hit by wagons in the street and one even died when he was kicked in the head while shoeing a horse. None of them lived past their fifties. My dad is in his sixties. So that, plus my mom's fear of me being dangerous (to be fair, I had already walked away from a motorcycle wreck), lead to the demise of my nascent piloting experience. The final phase was that a couple months after that we moved anyway. Not that you can't be a pilot anywhere else, but I didn't have access to the pilot who had taken an interest in me. I did finally jump out of a perfectly good airplane a few years ago, though. That was sweet. I've never felt that wonderful before or since.

So, Queen, get the boy a flight manual and let him see how he likes the science part of it first. If he doesn't, he'll be buying a lot of passenger tickets. There's something about the air here that makes people achieve great things in the air.