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| Billie Silvey |
| September 2007 |
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| An eclectic website about Women, Christianity, History, Culture and the Arts--and anything else that comes to mind. |
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| Flight |
| Flight has always been a part of my experience. My father was a pilot in the the Army Air Corps. He flew single-propeller planes and was a Link trainer instructor, teaching prospective pilots to fly in conditions where they don’t have a visual of what’s around them. That’s my dad above in the machine with instruments like those in the cockpit of an airplane but no way to see out. The reactions of the pilot indicate to the instructor if the proper moves are made to fly safely. When he returned to civilian life, he continued flying, this time in private planes in the Panhandle of Texas. To maintain his pilot’s license, he had to log a certain number of hours in the air each month. He took odd jobs transporting goods and people from one place to another to get the air time in and help offset the cost of renting a plane. I was the only member of the family who would fly with him on those hops from airport to airport across the flat quilt of farmland. It wasn’t particularly pleasant. Those closed cockpits all smelled the same, a mixture of cleaning solution and vomit. It was no wonder people got sick, what with the bumps from thermals caused by strips of highway baking in the sun and the strong winds that knocked the light craft around the sky. As I grew older, I came to value our time together and the distinctive view of the earth you can only get from a private plane. I also learned to participate in the projects, from navigation to steering the plane for short periods. One job I enjoyed was aerial photography. Daddy would fly us over the site we were to photograph, and I’d hold the stick steady while he’d lean out the window and snap the shutter. We had to bank sharply to be at the right angle to the property, and the G force smeared our faces against our skulls and spread our mouths into gruesome smiles. We sold the photos to the people who owned the businesses we photographed, a unique view of the fruit of their labors. Another was a flight to Dallas/Fort Worth Airport to pick up a part someone needed to mend a machine. On the way back, we hit a terrible storm. Visibility dropped to nothing as we were surrounded by dust and dark clouds. I was reading the marks on the charts and listening to the radio for the distinctive pattern of dots and dashes that represented the various airports. It was hard to do when the map kept bucking on my lap. Finally, I picked up Wichita Falls, and Daddy brought us in for a bumpy landing. I felt so relieved to be back on solid ground, though my head kept bouncing around for some time. I was grateful for my father’s instrument training then. After Frank and I married, we mostly lived on the West Coast, which meant a lot of commercial flights home to see our families. The flights to Texas went fast as we traveled away from the sun, arriving much later than we’d left. The trip home seemed to take forever, as the sun moved with us, hanging at almost the same point in the sky for hours. As we set our watches back with each time zone, very little clock time had passed while we’d hung suspended in the sky. Finally, late in our lives, we were able to fly across the ocean and visit lands I’d never really expected to see. What a treat to board a plane where the accents, and even the menus, hinted of the joys to come! In this issue, we'll look at the history of flight, flights of fancy, and flight in Scripture. I hope you'll share your own experiences with flight and what it means to you but emailing me at b.silvey@sbcglobal.net. |