I'm learning how to fly because I'm ready to die
With my first flight lessons getting closer, I keep thinking about what my first takeoff will be like. Going down the runway at full throttle for the first time, I'll probably already feel like I'm about to die.
What if the best day of my life will be my last?
I also keep watching this video over and over, trying to imagine what the pilot must have felt and thought in those final moments. Did he or she regret becoming a pilot? And what would I feel and think in that situation? For example, I think when the bank angle reached 90°, that's when the realization hits:
You can't recover from this. This is it.
What's probably pretty fucked up is that I also keep trying to see if the pilot's body is visible in some frame. It does look like there's a chance. Feel free to judge me, but I'm just being honest.
However, I keep thinking that it's not going to be so bad, and I don't even feel like I'm joking about it. I know it sounds foolish to think that. For sure I won't just watch the ground come closer and be like, “Cool, I guess that's it.” For sure I'll be terrified and regret all my life choices or something. Right?
No! Something inside me tells me that it will be fine. If it's going to happen, and there's no point in flying the plane anymore (especially if I'm alone), I'd accept it and try to enjoy my last few seconds. I don't know if that's what other people did who died doing what they love, but I like to believe that.
Additionally, after you know there's no point anymore, in most cases, it's all over in a few seconds anyway. So how much time would there even be to feel terror?
After enough thinking, the following rhyme suddenly came to me, and it immediately felt very true, like few things do:
I'm learning how to fly because I'm ready to die.
Since this sounds even more foolish, I typed this into a search engine to see if anyone else had been as foolish as I was. The search engine returned this article. Just reading the beginning showed me I had struck gold, because indeed, it feels quite ridiculous to put so much faith in a machine:
To go up in the air inside a machine is a very stupid thing to do. It is also transcendentally cool and extremely practical. We go up for sport. We go up for commerce. We go up for war. We go up so effortlessly and routinely these days that it's easy to forget what it entails: the elevation of a mighty payload of metal and fuel, with souls aboard, by the incorporeal air. Physics says it's possible over and over again on the departures board at JFK, but common sense stubbornly insists that it's just plain dumb.
This part is also very good and presumably close to what I'll think:
Out by the plane, the first thing Tom and I did was go through the preflight checklist. Never am I more skeptical about the ultimate wisdom of our experts in aviation than when I see some short-sleeved pilot suffering the indignities of wind and rain to stand beneath the belly of a plane and eyeball the structural integrity of a row of rivets. That's it? I think. That's safety? But it was no different with Six-Two Romeo. Tom and I crouched and contorted, we loomed and looked as we inspected the plane's bolts, pins, winches, and wingtip lights. We felt down the length of the propeller for any imperfections. We stopped before the cowling (what I wanted to call the hood), and Tom popped it open like the lid on a lunch box to reveal an engine that could have been started with a few yanks on a pull string. We checked it for fire damage and the presence of animals. In everyday life, I have grown accustomed to a computer or some other device mediating between me and the world. The digital magically renders error and danger obsolete. But search an engine for animals and you know you're back to the basics. It's just you and your eyeballs and whatever faith they can lend that the engine hasn't been molested by some rabbits.As things progressed, I continued to see just what a thoroughly analog experience flying can be. In Six-Two Romeo there is no autopilot, no computer, no digital communication between the pilot and the controls. A commercial Airbus or Boeing jet might be one intricate and high-powered mainframe, but Tom's Piper Cherokee was a distant cousin of the lawn mower. Expand the motor on your rider and take away a wheel, enclose the seat and add one for a buddy, throw on a pair of wings, and presto. Your grass eater is now ready for takeoff.It was kind of thrilling. Here was a well-engineered (if a tad aged) block of metal and wire nestled inside an aerodynamic hull. It was going to put me up there in the blue sky as if by magic. And I would guide it there using nothing but my hands and an intimate physical knowledge of how it worked. No updates, no inputs, no hitting enter. Just me and the 1.0 world.
I can recommend reading the full article.