You’re familiar with those cars or trucks with big signs on the back of them that say “Follow Me” or “Pilot Car” on the back that guide you through one-way detours during highway construction.   Pilots of aircraft landing at small to mid-size airports have them as well, usually offered up in order to entice you to taxi your airplane to the best location on the field where you can rest your weary bones and buy fuel from the same people who provide the friendly pilot car.

Landing at an unfamiliar airport can be disorienting, even if you study the airport layout ahead of time.   A two-dimensional diagram, and even a Google Earth snapshot from above, doesn’t resemble the view from the runway once you are rolling along.   Until the advent of readily-available GPS-guided navigation tools, pilots could be easily confused by which taxiway leads to which desired location.   At large airports, taxiing to the ramp could be more complex than the route you took to get there.

If there’s a tower and you know where you want to go, you can always ask for help. Simply say you are “unfamiliar” and ask for “progressive taxi instructions” and the ground controller will guide your every turn.   It takes precious time, so if they’re busy it might be a bit stressful, but usually it’s no problem and they’re more than happy to provide the service.

The “Follow Me” vehicle—often a converted golf cart or ATV, is provided by the local FBO to make sure you don’t accidentally park in someone else’s spot and maybe even buy someone else’s fuel.   It’s a wonderful service, because by the time you have landed you’re tired of making executive decisions and want to relax and following someone who will guide you to the right parking spot takes ta bit of worry out of your arrival.

There is however, a small “gotcha.”   As in all relationships, there is an invisible umbilical cord connecting the pilots of the two vehicles. Such a dependency requires a modicum of trust.   How do I know where I am being taken?   If I had landed at a small airport in crime-ridden Northern Mexico would I wonder where the “follow me” truck was leading me—especially if the sign was written in English?   Even in a mid-size airport in California, would I trust the “follow me” car was leading me to the FBO I intended to go to, or instead the one with the highest fuel and tie-down prices?

Woody Allen once quipped that the reason he spent so many years on his therapist’s couch was because he was breast-fed from falsies.   I confess to you right now that the thirty seconds or so I have spent out of my life focused on that image was a waste of precious time, but there is a point to be made here.   Each of us are born with certain ingredients in place that then get nurtured or otherwise modified by our experiences, and those are the ingredients that determine the extent to which we allow ourselves to trust that the pilot car is not going to lead us to a remote section of the airport where we will be roughed up by ruffians waiting in the bushes or even worse, pay more for fuel than we need to.

But the primary ingredients in building a trusting relationship are simply time and experience.   If we land at the same airport repeatedly and the “follow me” car always takes us to the right place, we are likely to trust them the next time. Trust is not faith though, and too much of it can be dangerous.   When the “follow me” car begins to take you to a dark corner of the airport with a bunch of grungy machine-gun toting folks lollying about it might be better to put on the brakes and get on the radio and make sure you’re tuned to the right frequency.

As a pilot, one never knows who is driving the “follow me” car.   One rarely if ever thinks about it.   One rarely cares.   It is what might be considered a low-risk situation.   The worst that is likely to happen is that you will park your airplane, shut it down, walk to the office and say, “whoops, this is the wrong place.”   That has never happened to me, and likely won’t.   The consequences of following the wrong leader in that situation are not terrible.

You know where this is going, don’t you?   Sometimes we just don’t know where we are being taken until we get there.   Maybe we always don’t know where we are going until we get there.   But our job as pilots in command is to fly our airplanes until we are finally docked and shut down.   We could, however awkward or painful, veer off and break the invisible umbilical cord and taxi ourselves right back to the runway.

Trust, when we have it, is a beautiful thing.   I do experience a sigh of relief when I see the “follow me” sign in front of me.   I am done navigating my way to the airport, and now all I need to do is relax and trust that my credit card is thick enough to contain the cost of the fuel about to be poured into my tanks and oh yes, that my bladder is strong enough to make it to the rest room.   Good thing I wasn’t breast fed from falsies.   I wasn’t breast fed at all, which, I guess, explains everything.

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Every two years, those who possess a private pilot’s certificate in their wallet are required by the FAA to take a flight review, or what is colloquially called a “check ride.”   It’s not a big deal, not nearly as onerous as taking your initial flight with an examiner. In fact, it can really be whatever you make it, so long as you find an instructor willing to sign you off.

The requirements are simple.   You merely jump in your plane with a certified instructor, fly for an hour or more, and then chat about it on the ground to eat up the required two hours total time.   And make sure you log the time, so if Big Brother looks you can show him you did it. Easy peasy.

Some of the more diligent pilots decide to make it a meaningful experience, and use the check ride the way it was intended, which is to make sure that their skills have not deteriorated, or better yet, as an opportunity to learn new tricks. (One has the option of gaining a new skill, called a rating, in lieu of the check ride.)   The more diligent pilots approach their biennial flight review by choosing an instructor who will confront their weaknesses, or, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, “a friend who will stab you in the front.”   They may decide to repeat the steps of their original training, or if confident about their fundamental skills, practice more difficult skills such as slow flight, spins and stall recovery, holding patterns, or tricky instrument approaches.

Most pilots I know don’t particularly like the check ride, because most pilots I know don’t like to do anything anyone else tells them they have to do.   I guess that’s true for most of us, but as a general rule I think pilots have it worse.   I am not sure why that is, but it probably has something to do with the machismo required to pack your body into a tin container and launch yourself off the surface of the planet while relying on the whims of a reciprocating engine and your own ability to manage the thing in such a way as to not spin mightily into the strawberry fields forever below.

I don’t know anyone who has ever “failed” a check ride, but I do know some folks who decide that failure is possible just so they can feel good about passing.   It’s not that by winning they will have bragging rights, at least not among pilots, but some people just like to make themselves feel good, and winning a game, even an easy one, usually feels better than losing (at least for some of us).

The check ride becomes a contest with one’s self, which in psychological lingo can be called sublimation, or in everyday language, the ability to turn lemons into lemonade. These pilots understand that like any other endeavor, there is great satisfaction to be achieved by feeling competent at something, and the route to greater competence is practicing increasingly complex or difficult skills.   They set up their own challenge within the check ride.   This time around, they say to an instructor friend, I want to be better at stall recovery, or some such thing.   The possibilities of course are fairly endless, as aviation is a capacious sport– a science, I like to think, big enough for the most capable of pilots to call themselves artists. If you shrug at this notion, watch an aerobatics display.

Those of us like myself who are fear-dominated often create challenges where they don’t need to be just so that we can channel our fear productively.   Fear can be a rather annoying companion, so I have always believed that because it never really leaves my side I might as well get to know it and hopefully befriend it.   The check ride, in fact, is not unlike some of the people I call friends; some of them annoy me and have distasteful attributes but I find their presence somehow edifying or comforting.   Flying holding patterns, and particularly entering them (which way?) is one of those distasteful parts of flying, so for me at least it would be a good idea to add them into my check ride.   But not this time around.

This time around, I have decided, I am going to focus not only on reviewing basic skills, but on callouts.   Callouts are exactly what they sound like.   The pilot or co-pilot says certain things out loud, sort of like a checklist, announcing to him or herself or anyone who might be eavesdropping what is going on in the moment, a verbal reminder that signals the need to do something or more likely, that things are going the way they ought to be going so that there is no need to do anything rash.   My favorite callout, as an example, occurs when the airplane is rolling down the runway and you reach enough speed for the airspeed indicator to come on line and you or the co-pilot shouts “airspeed alive!”   I don’t know if any pilots out there have a little voice in their head whispering “and so am I!”   I certainly don’t.

Callouts are challenging to me simply because it is an area that was completely neglected in my training, so I never had an opportunity to learn or practice them.   They aren’t difficult, nor are they even necessary, but it is a little thing I can get better at.

I am writing these words right now on New Year’s Eve, and it strikes me that the custom of making New Year’s resolutions has something in common with the check ride.   We recognize a weakness or three in ourselves, and vow to do better.   I have never liked resolutions, thinking that they are just invitations to failure, and I find failing increasingly tiresome, but perhaps if I think instead that resolutions are merely setups for life’s ongoing check ride I will do better.   As long as no one makes me do it.

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Surrounded by national forest, Fish Hole Creek flows through the small Oregon town of Bly.   For a small town located in the midst of a national forest, 50 miles from the closest Walmart, Bly has had more than its share of notoriety.   Besides being the home of Earnest Ujaama, who in 2002 was indicted and arrested for setting up a Taliban terrorist training camp just outside of town, Bly was also the place where, in May of 1945, a Japanese bomb exploded and killed six people while picnicking.   That makes Bly the location of the only fatalities suffered during WWII in the contiguous United States as a result of an enemy attack.

The bomb was one of several hundred attached to balloons that the Japanese launched in the hope they would reach the west coast of the United States.   At the time, the Japanese knew a bunch of things that we gringos did not, including how to take advantage of the jet stream.

It wasn’t until American bombers launched raids out of the Marianas to Japan and faced headwinds as strong as 200 mph that Americans “discovered” the jet stream for themselves. American meteorologists were late to the party, and it took pilots facing the challenge of how long their fuel would allow them to fly to educate them.

When flying coast to coast commercially you will have noticed, undoubtedly, that the trip typically takes an hour less when flying from west to east than in the opposite direction.   That is because most route planners try to save fuel by hitching a ride on the jet stream, which blows perpetually from the west to east on this planet (other planets with atmospheres have them as well). The jet stream can be found between 25,000 and 40,000 feet above ground, and can move anywhere between 50 and 300 miles per hour, which is why when you have it on your tail you can really make good time.

Understanding the physics behind the jet stream requires a much deeper knowledge of the fundamentals of meteorology than I have ever had, which is a sad reminder that the “B” I received in high school physics was an act of sheer generosity.   If you’re interested in the how and why of these things, you will need to know about the Coriolis effect and a few other key meteorological concepts, and if you do know this already you are certainly a better person than me.

What I do know is that this powerful wind meanders through the atmosphere above us, affecting the flight path of airplanes as well as the weather below and around it.   It gives new meaning to the phrase “go with the flow” in my quest to find new meaning in pedestrian phrases.   Pilots can hitch a ride on it, or try to avoid it going the opposite direction.   Warriors can launch balloons into it in order to deliver explosives to their enemies.   And blog writers linking the world of aviation to the world of the psyche can attempt to use it as a metaphor.

Given that the jet stream will likely be around as long as there is an atmosphere surrounding a large spinning ball creating energetic forces, then we can say with some confidence and apologies to Stephen Sondheim that when you’re a jet stream you’re a jet stream all the way. Fierce winds of hatred seem to blow interminably amid the surrounding atmosphere of loving-kindness.   Government and the taxes that support it is a force majeure that seems to operate the same way.   Suffering, also like the jet stream, is an ineluctable force of nature that follows a capricious, meandering path.    And, not unlike a pilot who tries to avoid it, trying to ignore either taxes or suffering in general will likely only make the pain last longer.

I can be fairly certain that some of Ujaama’s neighbors may not have even known that he was training terrorists in the nearby woods.   And while there may not be balloon bombs threatening overhead at this very moment, the sky and the forces of nature it contains will offer up its surprises and outlive all of us.

“That’s right,” the prodigious 10-year-old Teddy says in J.D. Salinger’s short story of the same name, “… I met a lady, and I sort of stopped meditating.”

Sometimes life throws us curves, and distractions get ahold of us.   In the cockpit, it is easy to be distracted by the fancy bells and whistles of complex computer-driven “glass cockpits”, or the chatter of a co-pilot talking about the time he went ice fishing in Wisconsin, or even the view of the major accident on the highway below.

Distractions have been determined to be major factors in some devastating accidents, including the horrible Asiana 777 crash that killed 3 and seriously injured 49 in San Francisco in 2013.   Some years back, well before the Asiana incident, realizing the pivotal part that distraction plays in accidents in general, the FAA recommended that airlines engage in something that has become known as the “sterile cockpit rule.”   The idea behind the rule was simply to reduce distractions during the most critical phases of flight—the takeoff and landing.

Along with many other pilots of small general aviation airplanes, I have incorporated the sterile cockpit rule into my own flying, and frankly, I love it. As part of the required passenger pre-flight briefing, I simply tell any passengers with whom I might be flying that they may not talk during takeoff from the moment I invoke the rule to the moment I tell them that it is over, and that the same is true during landing.   Usually, that means that following the runup, as I taxi to takeoff position, I tell my passengers that “we’re going sterile” and then, after reaching a comfortable cruise climb and the airplane is “cleaned up” (flaps are retracted and prop and power are set) I say “ok, we’re good to talk”.  On arrival to the destination, I invoke the sterile cockpit rule when I reach pattern altitude if flying the pattern or about 3 miles out if I am flying straight in.   I don’t release the rule until after exiting the runway and contacting the ground controller in order to get my taxi clearance.

I like the rule because I can present it as such and not seem like such a jerk in the process.   What I would really like to do is to tell my chatty friends, “I need to focus now so shut the hell up,” but that would be rude, so having a rule that applies to everyone regardless of whether I like you or not is convenient.

As much as I dislike rules in general, they really can be handy.   It’s so much easier to tell someone that smoking isn’t allowed in the house than to single someone out and say sorry, you’re stinking up the place and giving me cancer (or, in my case, making it worse), you didn’t wipe your feet before you came in and you smell like dogshit so I would appreciate if you kindly take your shoes off doesn’t work as well as a rule that no one wears shoes in the house.   It’s even better when you can say it’s your partner’s rule, because blaming someone else is often a handy way of making yourself look a little more tolerant than you really are.

It is always a confrontation when I am wanting some peace and quiet and people around me are (typically unwittingly) doing everything they can to disturb it. As someone who is generally shy about confronting anyone about anything unless I am in the therapist’s chair and it’s my job, it is clear to me as I write this that what I need is a sterile cockpit rule that I can invoke whenever I damn please. But although I can imagine myself, perhaps during a hailstorm in the Sahara desert, saying something like, “Excuse me, but I would appreciate a little quiet right now while I formulate a thought,” the truth is that I am not likely going to be that much of a pilot in command outside the cockpit or the therapy office, and instead I am going to have to try another tactic.   As much as I would like to say to everyone around me, “we’re going sterile,” I am afraid anyone other than a pilot friend would look at me askance and wonder exactly which one of my imaginary friends I am addressing.

The more realistic approach is to create a sterile cockpit rule that I can enforce myself, a procedure, perhaps as I launch into my day in the morning and again as I prepare to arrive back and onto the soft, nurturing runway of sleep. For a while, years ago, I was meditating religiously for 20 minutes twice a day, and that really helped.   I created my own sterile cockpit in my office, disconnecting the phone and putting a sign on my door as if I were in a hotel room doing something enjoyable.   No one bothered me.   I am not sure, exactly, how and why I stopped.   I had already met a lady, so that couldn’t have been it.   Perhaps Salinger’s 10-year-old whiz kid could tell me, although by now he’d probably be about my age.   And he never was anything more than a figment of a writer’s imagination anyway.   Guess I’ll need to figure that one out myself.

May this new year bring you clear skies and tailwinds.   And may this new year’s eve be an opportunity to meditate, however briefly, on the blessing of living another day.   Among my many blessings are those of you who take the few minutes out of your day to read my often silly words, maybe laugh a little bit, maybe reflect a bit.   May your better angels accompany you on all your flights. Thank you for being there, and happy new year.

Owing to various undisclosed aspects of my personality, I can report that it is considerably easier for me to list my weaknesses than my strengths. This may be one of my few strengths.   When I took a boating course, I did pretty well but for the life of me I could not pass the knots section.   I am clearly knot challenged.   I even cannot tie my shoes properly, or at least the way most people do it.   I once had a bunch of behavior analysts teach me, and I could do it briefly, but then forgot.   Fortunately, as a pilot, other than tying down an airplane at some small airports, one doesn’t need to know how to tie knots and it isn’t on the test.

As far as the stuff that is on the test goes, I am considerably challenged in the important area of weather knowledge.   It is not that I am disinterested; in fact, I find weather fascinating.   I can tell you a few basic facts, but beyond that I’m not so good at it.   I could blame it on the fact that flying in California one doesn’t have much use for it, but that would be a pretty lame excuse.

Every once in a while a weather phenomenon pops out at me from the shadows that I find particularly romantic.   We are all familiar with moon shadows, thanks to Cat Stevens, and those nights when the moon shines brightly are particularly beautiful when flying.   On a well moonlit night, a pilot can sometimes watch the shadow of her airplane fly alongside her as it is projected on the tops of the clouds below.

Many of us are unfamiliar with the poetically named wind shadow.   Wind shadows occur close to the ground, when buildings, trees or other obstructions block the path of the wind.     When buildings are located near a runway, as they often are, and you are in the process of landing or departing, carefully adjusting your airplane’s attitude to honor the surface winds, the wind can suddenly drop away as you enter the temporary void of the wind shadow and poof!–there goes your previously well-adjusted attitude.

I like to think of wind shadows proportional to the wind that they are shadowing.   The greater the wind, the more the shadow will have an impact.   When landing or departing in a heavy crosswind, any sudden change in the wind will require speedy adjustment, but not so speedy as to lose one’s suavecito.   Any good pilot will tell you that one must never lose one’s suavecito.   This is an aviation term that roughly translates to the lack of sudden, jerky movements when controlling an airplane.

The nice thing about wind shadows is that, unlike moon shadows, they really can’t follow you.   You could—in theory—hide in one for a while, but unless you want to stay where you are or meet someone else who might like hiding in wind shadows that would be pointless.   On the ground, they may come in handy when trying to light cigarettes in the wind, but fortunately not too many people do that anymore.

There are some tree-lined streets a few miles from my home and I was told that local farmers planted them as wind breaks to protect the crops.   Leave it up to those clever humans to mess with Mother Nature in order to increase the yield of their crops. The next time you find yourself eating strawberries, artichokes, or God forbid iceberg lettuce, be sure to bow to the farmers who created wind shadows in which to nurture them.

Back when I was in college, before the dawn of civilization, I used to play and sing “Moon Shadow” to kids at the pre-school where I worked between classes.   I am not sure Cat Stevens wrote it as a children’s song, but it caught on big in that particular demographic.   Like many of the other children’s songs, the lyrics didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it was a catchy tune and you could infer somehow, buried deep between the lines, that Cat Stevens was just trying to let you know that we shouldn’t take life so seriously.   That’s a really tough concept for me, but one worth grappling with, hopefully not too seriously.   In that wind vein, I imagine that if the winds were winds of adversity, as winds often are, I wouldn’t at all mind being followed by wind shadows.   A life well lived, methinks, is a life bound to expose us to winds of misfortune, and a break now and then can be quite a blessing.

Winds will gust wantonly from time to time, presenting challenges to pilots and non-pilots alike.   We dance with them as best as we can, dip our wings and point our noses into them.   But as we struggle to leave the earth and return safely, their sudden disappearance can be a challenge.   The shadow of the wind can feel like a gift of safety, but when the shadow takes you by surprise and you lose your dancing partner it can be frightening.   The very idea of it ties me up in knots, and that’s not easy for me to do.

I don’t know how the Boy Scout manual came to reside on one of my shelves, but there it was.   I had never been a Boy Scout, ever, at least not in any official capacity, although as a child I would have qualified to be called a Good Kid, at least by my mother.   I don’t remember how old I was when I read the manual, but I recall finding it interesting, filled with all sorts of practical stuff.   Among the least interesting bits though was the Boy Scout motto, “Be prepared.”

Then as now I found the motto curiously vague and uninspiring.   (As mottos go, you have to give the NYPD extra points for its passionate Fidelis ad Mortem— faithful unto death, especially when compared to the LAPD’s rather pedestrian “To protect and to serve.”)  What did those Boy Scouts, icons of purity and knots, mean by the admonition to “be prepared”? It seemed so obvious; why wouldn’t anyone want to be prepared?

The targets of the admonishment were Boy Scouts– not Men Scouts.   Boys, left alone to their characterological insouciance would not likely think about preparation.   They don’t even make their beds without being threatened. If they did, you might consider a referral to a local head-shrinker.

I guess the idea that we need to be told to be prepared is based on the assumption that everyone comes out of the uterus fundamentally lazy. We need the guidance of grownup men in shorts to learn how to get off our butts and do our homework.   Undoubtedly, the man scout founders of the Boy Scouts, unfazed by their organization’s very initials, didn’t grow up in a New York Jewish ghetto in which the failure to do one’s homework would clearly be the gateway drug to bad grades, which meant you were stupid, not really Jewish, probably adopted, and going to end up in a place called hell which didn’t exist for Jews but for you there would be an exception.

Pilots too have their dictum to be prepared, appearing in the form of a regulation requiring them to be familiar ahead of time with everything required to minimize surprises.   The rule is taken dead seriously by those pilots who don’t want to end up seriously dead. Pilots need to prepare by, among other things, knowing the amount of fuel required plus reserves for each flight, predicted winds and weather, the weight and balance of their ships, alternate airports and the services available at each, and must be careful to check that the route they are traveling has not been temporarily restricted because the president and his overly expensive airplane may be nearby.

But preparation has its limits, because sometimes life comes at you so sideways that even the best peripheral vision can’t catch it.  A few years back, I thought I was doing as much as I could to keep myself healthy: eating well, losing weight, hiking almost daily (at least in August) and doing yoga.   So when I had some minor symptoms I had no difficulty believing the symmetry that minor symptoms were symptoms of something minor. I was pretty surprised, as you might imagine, to learn that I was suffering from stage IV metastatic cancer. Despite doing my best efforts to stay fit, I suddenly found myself—as pilots would say, “behind the airplane.”

I would argue that there are times when preparation can be overdone.   In the course of presenting papers at conferences, I discovered an inverse relationship between preparation and audience interest.   In the old days, it was customary to write a paper and simply read it, but that practice has become effete and audiences now expect to be entertained by spontaneous displays of wit and wisdom.

The more prepared I was for a presentation, the more attached I became to saying what I had rehearsed, resulting in a loss of spontaneity, so my presentations became stiff and boring.   Nowadays, I prefer to create rough outlines ahead of time and then try to wing it as much as possible.   It doesn’t always work, usually because I am verbose and it takes me a half hour to get through the planned first five minutes.   Spontaneity certainly has its drawbacks, but generally, when it comes to most speaking engagements, as long as I can stay focused it tends to work out well for me.

In most cases, the Boy Scouts probably have it right.   It is hard to imagine being over-prepared for a flight.   Yet, an essential component to preparation is the preparation for a surprise, which may seem like an oxymoron, but I don’t think so.   As a family therapist, I always used to tell my students that one should always have a plan before going into a therapy session, but to be prepared to change course at any moment.   “Be spontaneous!” goes the paradoxical mantra, which I take to mean that while we set out on a path to a destination, we remain so connected to the moment that we are willing and open to shift course at any time.

As a grown boy, I don’t know if I would make my bed if I didn’t have someone else do it for me.   In all likelihood I wouldn’t.   Nor would I do the dishes shortly after I used them.   After all, sinks are made big so that they could hold a lot of dirty dishes. Maybe if I had been a real Boy Scout, instead of just reading the manual, things might have been different.

It doesn’t keep me up at night, but on certain rare occasions I have wondered why it is that airplanes “taxi” from the ramp to the runway and back again. Why, after all, don’t they just “roll” their way from one place to another, or simply drive, given that they are always on the ground when they do so.

Taxis and taxiing probably intrigue me because taxis are in my family’s blood. My cousin and his wife owned a taxi company in the Bronx. Gertrude Martell kept the drivers in line and seemed to run the show. She was a tough character, and was known around town as “Gravel Gertie”. For a few decades you could mention her name to any cab driver in the city and they would have at least have heard of her. My father drove a cab in his twenties at night to augment the income from his day job selling candy, as did my grandfather and others in the family as well. I always wanted to drive a taxi, but my dad thought it was too dangerous and used his influence to extinguish my fantasy (as in, “I forbid you to drive a taxi.”)  To this day I pause when I get an email from Uber or Lyft and spend at least a few seconds considering my options.

The word “taxi” is merely an abbreviation for “taximeter,” a meter that measures the distance traveled in order to determine the fare, or “tax”. (“Tax” stems from the Latin “taxare”–  to censure, charge, or compute.) Airplanes have dreaded Hobbs meters that measure the amount of time that an airplane’s engine is cranking; they are the bane of every student pilot because those meters determine how much your lesson is going to cost. At one point they were designed to switch on when the electrical system was ignited, but pilots quickly figured out that they could switch off the electrical master and taxi just fine without electricity, so Hobbs meters were redesigned to be switched on and off by oil pressure, so that they will run as long as the engine is running. But the use of the word “taxi” for what airplanes do on the ground pre-dated the invention of Hobbs meters, so the Hobbs “taximeters” in airplanes could not have been the origin of the term.

The most likely origin of the word in connection to what planes do on the ground dates back to Henri Farman’s flight school outside Paris in the early 1900s. In order to train new pilots, Farman used a “simulator”—an airplane with shorter wings and a heavier body, one that could not fly (or at least not fly too high or far) in the hands of an overly eager newbie, but could simulate the feel of an airplane. Farman thought it would be a good idea to create an airplane with “clipped wings” in order to not risk too many of the flock in the hands of inexperienced pilots.

Mostly, these “simulators” would roll around the ground like a taxicab driving slowly down the street looking for fares, and eventually folks began calling the machine a “taxi”. The expression took hold and spread to other schools. That’s the story, but if anyone knows otherwise, I won’t stick to it.

Regardless of the word you use for it, if you’re in an airplane, you have to find a way to get from your hangar or parking spot to the runway in order to get yourself off the ground. Maybe that’s why Mark Twain so famously said that there are only two things in life that are inevitable: death and taxis.

I have deep empathy for flight instructors.   They are minor heroes in their own right, having to sit passively while their ashen-faced students barely defy death attempting to place the wheels of their rented airplanes on solid ground, many times a day.   In trying to motivate their disheartened students, instructors sometimes reach into their bag of aviation clichés and mutter perhaps the most common one of them all: “Any landing that you walk away from,” they say with an ingenuous grin, “is a good one.”

Sure it is.   But while we are at it, let’s translate that ditty into plain English:   “That landing was so bad it’s a miracle we’re still alive.”

If you’re learning to fly an airplane, landing them is a pretty important skill, because the alternative can be pretty ugly.   For a variety of reasons, it is also the most difficult part of learning to fly, not the least of which has to do with the fact that building a machine capable of defeating gravity is such a divergent thing from building a machine that relies on it.   It’s really hard to do both things well, as those who attempt to build flying cars can tell you.  The difficulty landing has even worked its way into some crevices of common parlance, so when we say we “landed” a job we are acknowledging that doing so required some extraordinary effort.

Without knowing how to bring an aircraft back down to earth safely one cannot really claim to have accomplished much as a pilot, because the rest of the flying endeavor isn’t really that difficult.   Because they are engineered that way, airplanes tend to love to fly, if you’ll forgive the anthropomorphic indulgence, and all pilots have to do—for the most part, is gingerly nudge them along.

But landing is another thing altogether.   The earth is a lot less forgiving than the air in which our airplanes fly, and getting quivering tons of metal to gracefully and harmlessly greet the surface requires exceptional skill.   And while skill alone will get you most of the way there, the unforeseeable and constantly shifting forces of nature that impinge on flight sometimes can defeat even the most skilled pilot.   It is with that recognition that those who fly often and land well offer up words of consolation and reassurance to those who don’t that any landing you walk away from is a good one.

For those of us whose self-criticism seem to reside deep in our bones, it’s downright tempting to hear those words as a feeble attempt to tell us that not only are we lousy pilots, but we wouldn’t be trusted to hold a newborn infant for five minutes.   Like the poet Stephen Kessler once said about poets who read their poetry while intoxicated, “Sure, alcoholism is a disease.   So what?,” I am not really impressed by words of consolation when I have done a bad job.   I walked away from a bad landing. So what?

It is true that when dealing with near-death experiences such as landing airplanes, the stakes are high enough that we really don’t need much to motivate ourselves to do better.   The idea of praising our efforts and trying to soften our failures is simply to make sure that we get back on the horse and learn to do better.

It is also an attempt to combat the deleterious effects of abundant self-criticism.   Those unfortunate folks who go through life with hubris and who manage to do a lousy job landing their airplanes don’t need reassuring clichés; they need to be humiliated, shamed, or effectively tortured.   I don’t want those folks flying airplanes, walking the face of the earth, or, for that matter, representing my country in the White House.

I have had good instructors and less good instructors over the years.   After every bad landing the good instructors typically say something to the effect of: “Let’s go around and try that again.”   They like their students to end with a feeling of success.  As a certified pilot, I continue to fly often with instructors, because one of the other oft-heard aviation cliché’s is the pilot’s license (although it isn’t really a license, but that’s another story) is a “license to learn.”   But when I fly solo, or fly with non-pilot passengers, and manage to screw up a landing, I confess that if I don’t mutter it out loud, I do tell myself that, having walked away from the landing, it was a good one.   It is a lie, I know, but it allows me to get back in the cockpit another day.

Unless you’re quite a bit younger and have been deprived of some of the greatest music in the last century, you know the song:

To everything, turn turn turn/ there is a season, turn turn turn/ and a time to every purpose under heaven.

And you also know that the lyric is an adaptation from Ecclesiastes, with the exception of the words “turn, turn, turn” and the “I swear it’s not too late” for peace at the end. Pete Seeger joked that he wrote the music to the song and “six words,” although I don’t know how or why he came up with the “turn turn turn” part.   It certainly worked, especially for the Byrds who had a smash hit with it. (When it was released previously by the Limeliters it was called “To Everything There is a Season.”)  I imagine that the notion of turning captured for Seeger the essence of the bible passage, that we can turn away from one path and go down another, or perhaps simply that we have choices in life.   There may be a time for war and a time for peace, but we humans have the agency to turn away from one and point ourselves in another direction.

King Solomon, of course, was the dude who enabled a couple of women to save on DNA testing by cleverly instructing the alleged mothers to cut their disputed baby in half in order to determine maternity, and he’s also the guy who is the attributed author of Ecclesiastes. I have neither a bone nor baby to split with Solomon the wise, so if he were around I might be inclined to confess a failing in order to get some aeronautical advice. It’s about turning.   Are you ready?   I am whispering now.   I really don’t know how an airplane turns.

There, I said it.   Sure, I know the answer I was supposed to memorize to get the question right on the exam, having to do with ailerons creating unequal lift and all that, and I sort of know what that means, but that doesn’t really explain it.   According to Rich Stowell, who knows more about the physics of flying in his fingernail than I do in my BMI-challenged body, the primary way an airplane turns is—hold on—the elevator.   That’s the thing on the tail that you usually think makes the airplane go up and down. (That’s why it’s called an elevator, after all.) But you see, flying an airplane is tricky, because most earthbound people think of turning in a two-dimensional way, and flying happens in a 3-dimensional way.   In other words, when you change the path of an airplane from going straight and level, you are curving its path, and that is a turn.

So, for example, if you say to a fish, turn around and look at me, and the fish could understand your thick Cockney accent, the fish could choose to swim in an upwards loop, a downwards loop, a sideways loop, or any other loop it chooses and still turn around and look at you.   All it would need is its tail operating the way an elevator does (although with eyes on its side, it might need a bit of rudder as well).

Now, while I am a bit embarrassed about my lack of understanding of what is probably some basic physics, I am not alone.   According to that same Rich Stowell (who used to bother me with his aerodynamic lectures in the tiny room where I was trying to pay attention to my own instructor), of the 900 pilots he has asked (he does this for a living), about a quarter of them said that it is the rudder that turns an airplane.   Even a fish knows better than that!

For any of you who might have considered flying with me but have changed your minds now that I have confessed that I don’t know how an airplane turns, you should have figured out by now that I do know how to make an airplane turn.   I won’t explain it to you now; you’ll have to trust me on this.   There is an essential difference between knowing and doing, and on top of that there is the fact that there are also a lot of different kinds of knowing.   Once you do something well enough, it could be argued, conscious knowing (e.g., verbal explanations) often disappears.   My friend David once witnessed me catch a hard hit line drive just above the dirt after diving like a bolt of lightning.   When I came up with it I humbly said, “I have no idea how I did that.” David, looking incredulous, said “It was just luck.” Fat chance.

While there are plenty of sources to which I can turn to learn more about turning, I prefer to consult the admired atavistic ones, such as King Solomon and Pete Seeger.   Just slightly less atavistic would be the words of Leslie Bricusse as channeled through the voice and melody of Anthony Newley, who asks “Who can I turn to, when nobody needs me?”   And rhetorically answers: “My heart wants to know and so I must go where destiny leads me.”   Destiny? Really?   Are we all just dogs on Fate’s leash?

Let go of the controls and the winds of destiny surely will turn us, whether we like where it takes us or not.   Ultimately, I suppose, neither Solomon, Seeger nor Bricusse tell us how to turn, but when Seeger adds the words “I swear it’s not too late”—great activist that he was– he’s hinting that maybe we can willfully decide to move from here to there.   And maybe, after enough practice, while we may not know just exactly how our airplane turns, we already know how to make it go where we want it to go.