Station Breaker

14 Fly by Wire

As the Unicorn bashes around like a golfball in a dryer, I keep my heavy hand near the control stick and watch the altimeter, waiting to manually release the drogue chute. Do it too soon and it'll shred itself apart. Wait too long and I'll still be burning the retro rockets as I crater myself in Guanabara Bay — that's the name my satellite map is showing me where my trajectory is taking me.

Flying a spacecraft like the Unicorn isn't quite like anything else. Maybe the closest analogy is a helicopter, but even then the comparisons kind of end beyond up and down controls.

At the root level, all fast-moving vehicles have their similarities — whether it's a Lamborghini or a high-altitude glider. You need to use finely tuned instincts to keep yourself from making a split-second mistake that can end your life.

The first time I ever took control of a flying machine I was seventeen. The end of that summer, a few weeks after I had my eye surgery, I took a bike ride to the local airport on my one day off.

Looking through the chainlink fence I saw an old guy in a windbreaker wiping the windshield of a white and blue twin engine Cessna 310.

"You fly?" he asked me when he saw me watching.

Man, I can't tell you what that question meant to me in that moment. Here I was, a teenager on a rusty beach cruiser who couldn't even afford a car and this guy asked if I was a pilot. For a brief second I could have been a peer — not some Air Force and Navy recruitment office reject.

"No," I replied.

"You want to?" he said, dropping the wash rag into a bucket.

I got my first good look at him. He was tall, tan and in his seventies but looked like a healthy fifty-year-old. There was a confidence about him you see in pro football coaches and generals.

"Yeah. Some day."

"How about today?"

Today? "You mean right now?"

He checked his watch. "A couple more hours of daylight. Why not?"

Up until that moment I had been a bookish kid who played flight simulators and toyed with the idea of being a pilot, but the only ambitious thing I had done was make enough money to get my eyes fixed. Beyond that, it was a kind of "some day" dream.

To be a pilot, not just the Saturday morning kind, but a guy who goes out there and pushes the envelope and tries to make the machine do things it wasn't supposed to, means having something in you that says, "Fuck it. Let's do it."

Getting into an airplane with a stranger ranks right up there with accepting rides from creepers with vans and eating strange candy from the dude down the street who still lives with his mother and watches you through the window.

Even worse, it's not like therapy can help you deal with the kind of fatal trauma you get when you're killed in a crash.

I knew the sky was my destiny when my mouth said, "Yes," before my brain even processed the information.

Mr. Sterner, that was his name, was breaking all kinds of rules when he casually asked me if I wanted to take flight in his plane.

Sterner couldn't have cared less. He'd flown sorties in Vietnam, trained pilots in the Navy then left the service to go run an insurance business with his brother.

He could give zero fucks what anybody told him was right or wrong.

In a split second he'd sized me up and decided that I was okay — that I wasn't going to go run my mouth off about the crazy guy at the airport that took me up in his airplane.

He treated me like an adult when he asked me if I wanted to fly.

Ten minutes after take-off he leaned back and folded his hands behind his head and told me to take the controls, just like that.

Where I'd been trusting him not to kill me in the air or try to grab my dick, he just sat back and said, "She's yours now," putting his life in my hands.

That was the first time I felt like a pilot. That was the first time I was a pilot.

I was nervous and scared, but that was just a small dull roar, like the sound of the shower running in another room. Yeah, I was aware of my anxiety, but it didn't affect me one bit.

I knew all the gauges and levers and switches from my simulators. But I didn't know the gut rolling feeling when you changed your pitch or brought the plane into a steep curve.

Where others feel motion sickness, for me it was like finding out I had a new sense.

I wasn't a pilot just because I had the balls or the stupidity to say "Yes." I was a pilot because in that moment it felt right.

Once a month I'd go fly with Sterner. Afterwards he'd buy me lunch and tell me stories about flying inches over jungle tops, scraping the trees, landing on carriers and crazy stories about his fellow pilots and trainees.

The week after I got accepted into college he died of prostate cancer. At the funeral reception his brother pulled me aside and handed me a cardboard box.

Inside was the windbreaker I met him in and a plastic display containing his Top Gun flight school cap.

The message was clear; wearing the hat was reserved for the men that actually went through that program. But taking care of Sterner's hat was being entrusted to me, his final student — a kid who never had a chance to set foot on a carrier as a pilot — but eagerly dropped his bike on the sidewalk and climbed the fence to ride shotgun with a crazy old man with a death wish.

"Save a beer for me, Sterner," I say, getting ready to hit the parachute release.