The encouraging thing is that every time you meet a situation, though you may think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it you find that forever after you are freer than you ever were before. . . . You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, “I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.”
—ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
At the end of the day, I still hated flying. The flight to Nantucket had done nothing to quell my fear of air travel. By the time our little plane touched down on the mainland, I knew I had to learn to fly. Just being a passenger on a flight hadn’t felt like enough to fully face my fear. I needed to be in the pilot’s seat, to see what it felt like to be in charge of my own fate while tens of thousands of feet above ground.
Another reason to give flying its due was because Eleanor had adored it. She flew more passenger miles in the 1920s and 1930s than any woman in the world, prompting Good Housekeeping to dub her “our flying First Lady.” It was harder for Franklin to travel because of his paralysis, so she flew all over the world on his behalf, at a time when most Americans still considered air travel unsafe. She flew on a government-issued C-87A aircraft called Guess Where II. It was originally intended for Franklin until it came to light that C-87As had a weakness for crashing and catching on fire. So the Secret Service approved it for Eleanor’s use instead.
In April 1933, Amelia Earhart attended a black-tie dinner at the White House. Eleanor had never flown at night and listened, enraptured, as Amelia described what it was like to look down and see all of Washington, D.C., twinkling below you. On a lark, Amelia suggested that she and Eleanor fly to Baltimore and back that very night. Within an hour the women were airborne, still wearing their evening dresses, gloves, and heels. Even I, hater of flying, was charmed by this story—two plucky dames ditching their boring dinner party to go joyriding in formal wear. The press had gathered at the airport by the time they landed.
“How do you feel being piloted by a woman?” a reporter asked Eleanor.
“Absolutely safe,” she replied. “I’d give a lot to do it myself.” Amelia offered to give Eleanor lessons, and the First Lady went so far as to receive her student pilot’s license, but Franklin discouraged her from pursuing it.
“I know how Eleanor drives a car,” he reportedly said. “Imagine her flying an airplane.”
If I could get my pilot’s license, I could finish what Eleanor started! But getting a pilot’s license, I soon discovered, cost between $7,000 and $10,000 and required a minimum of forty hours of flight training with an instructor. There had to be another way. Then I remembered a conversation I’d had with an investment banker friend at a party a few years ago. He’d told me that he’d had a few too many at the company banquet and bid on fighter pilot lessons in a silent auction. He and a friend had gone dogfighting earlier that afternoon.
“It’s a civilian dogfighting school where regular people get to play fighter pilot for a day,” he’d explained.
“Like a computer simulation?” I’d asked hopefully.
“Naw, dude, you’re actually up in a plane at five thousand feet. The instructor is there to take off and land, but otherwise you’re flying that motherfucker! We were doing all these crazy-ass tricks!” He mimed flying an airplane, spilling a bit of his drink. “At one point I almost blacked out from the g-forces! It was awesome!”
It sounded awful, which was exactly why I felt compelled to do it. I e-mailed him and got the phone number of the company, Air Combat USA. When I called, I found out that the next available opening was a month away. It was no bargain, but it was certainly more affordable than getting a pilot’s license. I gave them my credit card number before I could came to my senses. The operator took down my information, explaining the strict financial penalty they would unleash upon my MasterCard should I cancel.
The next weeks were filled with dread. Fighter piloting loomed in the distance, ugly and terrible, above all the other challenges. When the flying lesson was days away, I thumbed, warily, through the packet of information Air Combat sent. I read the letter of instruction:
Your mission is scheduled to begin at 1300 hours. Please report for duty 15 minutes early to allow time to suit up in your flight suit and pick out your helmet and parachute.
At first I found the military talk sort of endearing. Then I reread the second sentence. Wait, are they letting me pick out my parachute? That’s putting a little too much trust in your customer, isn’t it? I don’t even think they let you pick your own lobster out of the tank at Red Lobster anymore. There was a promotional DVD, which I popped into my computer. The narrator had a voice for infomercials, the ones selling powerful cleaning agents. The video opened at an airport with shots of extraordinarily ordinary-looking people arriving on the scene wearing jean shorts and T-shirts with the sleeves ripped off. Then they were zipping themselves into jumpsuits and climbing into planes with Air Combat instructors. In his loud-but-not-loud voice, the narrator said: “You’re probably thinking, ‘Wait a second! I’ve never done this before! I don’t even know how to fly!’ That’s the beauty of what we do. No experience is necessary. You just show up and we handle the rest.”
The planes were taking off and we’d moved on to the flying portion of the video and oh no oh no OH HELL NO Lord Jehovah someone hold me like a baby, for I was scared. It was worse than I’d imagined. I yelped, hands flying over my mouth, watching a plane dropping through the sky looking as if it had lost power. Then the shot cut to two planes, noses pointed straight up in the air, in a side-by-side vertical climb. All the while, that voice in the background: “Experience the rush of air-to-air combat!”
Some of the video was shot inside the plane while other parts were outside as the planes filmed each other. These were the worst bits. There was an aerial shot of a plane blasting across the screen completely upside down. Another peeled off into a couple of barrel rolls, rotating wing over wing. One plane went into a backflip as an evasive measure but still got “shot down,” fake smoke trailing out of the back.
But that wasn’t all! In the final minute, we were treated to a sequence that ended with a plane in a nosedive hurtling toward the earth, spinning, spinning . . . Then the planes were landing. An instructor and customer shared a team-building high five. The narrator concluded: “Give us a few hours and we’ll bring out the fighter pilot in you! Do you think you have the right stuff?”
I didn’t. I had the wrong stuff. The wrong stuff! I returned the DVD to its sleeve, which had the company’s motto printed across the top: Everything is real . . . except the bullets! This was not for people of reason.
“There’s no way I’m going to be able to do this,” I announced to Dr. Bob on the eve of my “mission.”
“Have you ever noticed that some people love roller coasters while others are terrified of them?”
“Sure.” I loved him for not saying, “Of course you can do this!” That’s what everyone thinks they’re supposed to say to show their support during moments of self-doubt. The problem is, you don’t believe them. It comes off as a patronizing, naive platitude. On top of that, they are telling you that you are wrong, which I always find irritating.
“Your body can’t tell the difference between fear and excitement. It reacts the same way to both—racing heartbeat, butterflies, perspiration. It’s your mind that decides whether the situation is something to be nervous or excited about. What you need to do is turn fear into excitement.”
Oh, is that all? “How?”
“Change your perspective of the situation. Change the narrative of your thoughts. Instead of thinking ‘I’m so scared!’ tell yourself, ‘I’m so excited!’ ”
I eyed him dubiously. “And if that doesn’t work?”
“Then try getting mad. One theory about anxiety is that it’s opposed by other emotions, such as aggression, which can be used to cancel it out,” he said. “Get into combat mode. Don’t be a worrier, be a warrior! Imagine yourself as a flying predator going after the enemy. Grrrr!” He actually growled.
“I can barely handle being a passenger on a plane being piloted by a licensed professional. Even the slightest bit of turbulence freaks me out.”
“What do you do during turbulence?”
“I grab on to the seat cushion and hold on tight.” I was already gripping one of the arms of his sofa just thinking about turbulence.
“Which gives you the illusion of control in a situation where you’ve relinquished all control to the pilot. Doing it makes you feel safer.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
“When the plane doesn’t crash, you believe on some level that grabbing the seat cushion is what saved you. Then you have to grab the seat cushion every time you feel turbulence.”
“So I grab the seat during turbulence. What’s the big deal?”
“It’s what we call a safety behavior, like tensing up, holding your breath, praying, something we use to try to control the situation when we’re scared, even if we can’t control it. At best, these behaviors become superstitions. At worst, they can lead to substance abuse if you start believing that you need a few drinks or pills to get through a party. They disempower you by reinforcing the idea that you can’t handle a situation.”
“But I actually can’t handle the situation that’s going to be happening tomorrow! I don’t know how to fly a plane!”
“Well, I’m no aviation expert, but you know what advice I would give to a first-time pilot?”
“What’s that?”
“If you run into any turbulence, don’t grab your seat cushion.”
Later that night I watched Top Gun, bare feet propped up on the coffee table bouncing in rhythm to the cheesy awesomeness of Kenny Loggins’s opening song, “Highway to the Danger Zone.” The movie had aired a few weeks ago on TNT, and I’d recorded it specifically to watch tonight, for firing-up purposes. Instead I watched Goose eject into the canopy and break his neck, and I kept rewinding, watching him retake his seat in the plane, only to suffer his fate all over again.
The next morning Matt was driving me down the Long Island Expressway to Air Combat, which was based out of a small airport an hour and a half away. We were running late because I had done everything I could that morning to delay us, down to taking the full dentist-recommended three minutes to brush my teeth. I hadn’t known it was possible to drive with a swagger until I’d met Matt. He eased his way around cars with the same confidence he used when striding across crowded rooms, knowing people would yield to him and automatically move to the side, which they did. Most of the time.
We’d just moved into the far left lane, only to be cut off by someone driving ten miles per hour slower than the speed limit. “Look at this douchebag,” Matt said indignantly, thrusting a hand in the air at the driver in front of us as if slapping him upside the head. “I’m trying to get my girl out to her flying lesson and he’s in the passing lane!”
I twisted my body in my seat toward Matt and suggested brightly, “Maybe we should go to Central Park instead! It’s such a beautiful day, after all. Shall we turn the car around?”
“Sorry,” he said. “I will not be party to any kind of wussery.”
Scowling, I turned straight ahead and sank back into my seat in a huff. “Says the man who’s afraid of heights! If I’m such a wuss, why don’t you do it?”
“I would if it weren’t so expensive. I’m not afraid of flying, I’m afraid of falling.”
“Most fears are over in five minutes. I have to fly this plane for an hour and—wait, why are you laughing?”
“I’m sorry, it’s just kind of funny. Most of your fears are about letting go of your inner control freak. Now you’re doing something where you get to be in total control, but you don’t like that, either.”
“Listen, I wouldn’t trust a first-time pilot no matter who it was,” I argued. “For the same reason that I wouldn’t trust a first-time brain surgeon to operate on me.”
My phone rang. The caller ID screen said: Mom. She’d been driving me crazy about this, calling with more frequency as the date drew near. I picked up and before she could utter a word, I said, “Seriously, Mom, I cannot talk to you right now. I am trying very hard not to freak out and you are going to freak me out. I’m teetering on the edge here, Mom. Do you understand? Teetering!”
“You can still back out,” she whimpered. I heard the muffled taps of her acrylic nails as she anxiously clutched at her phone. “You don’t have to do this.” Though a few minutes before I had been trying to talk myself out of this, her trying to talk me out of it somehow strengthened my resolve.
“I do have to do this! I made a promise. To myself. To Eleanor. To the universe. I’ll call you when it’s over.” I hung up.
“That wasn’t very nice,” Matt observed.
“I know,” I grunted. I’d regretted it even as I’d said it, yet I hadn’t been able to stop myself. “But I can’t deal. It’s like getting a call from my own subconscious.”
My mother was a worrier. After I’d gotten my driver’s license, every time I’d left the house, my mom would say, “Watch out on the road. There are a lot of crazy drivers out there.” Even now she rarely let me drive my little sister anywhere, afraid that if there was an accident she’d lose us both. You can never be too careful had been a common refrain when I was growing up. You could, actually. According to Dr. Bob, overprotective parents, in their attempt to raise conscientious children, were constantly sending the message that the world is full of dangers that will surely get you as soon as you let your guard down. Kids became trained to find risk in every new experience. My mom had drilled these warnings into my head when I was growing up; after I left home, her voice had become the voice in my head.
“Well, hanging up on your mom is pretty childish.”
“Well, she treats me like a child!” I said petulantly. “How am I supposed to get past these fears if she’s always calling and reinforcing them?”
But his comment only made me feel guiltier. Fantastic. Now I was worrying about her worrying about me. And somewhere she was probably worrying that she’d upset me. It was like a goddamn hall of mirrors up in here. I wasn’t trying to push her away, but now that I was being trained to patrol my thoughts for worry, it made me aware of how often she did it. It was hard to keep the edge out of my voice whenever she started in. She was also extremely sensitive to criticism, and I’d gotten snippy with her enough times that she barely called anymore. In the past, we’d have long chats; then she’d pass the phone to my dad for a few wrap-up questions. Now it was my dad who called.
Matt changed the subject. “Aren’t you the least bit excited, though? You’re about to do something you’ll remember for the rest of your life.”
“Oh, I’ll remember this for the rest of my life,” I said, “all three hours of it.”
Matt gave up trying to rally my spirits and flipped on the radio. “Highway to the Danger Zone” blared forth.
“NOOOOO!” I cried in disbelief. For the first time that day, I was smiling.
“It can’t be!” Matt exclaimed.
We fully rocked out. I was head-banging and playing air guitar. He was drumming on the steering wheel as he drove. The person in the next car over was probably saying, “Look at those douche bags!” But it didn’t matter. We were in the zone.
An hour and a half later our shoes were crunching across the airport parking lot as we walked hand in hand toward the Air Combat office. Along one side of the lot was a chain-link fence and through its empty wire diamonds I could see a runway and a small airfield full of prop planes. We entered the unassuming one-story building that could’ve been a chiropractor’s office in another life. An amiable receptionist at the front desk directed us to a room down the hallway. It was small and unadorned with two long tables and a few chairs. Standing at the front of the room in an army green flight suit was our instructor, a former U.S. Marine named Larry who wanted us to call him “Slick.” This was his call sign, or pilot nickname.
“In addition to being an instructor, I’m also the company’s mechanic, so I’m usually covered in oil,” Slick explained. He shook our hands, and Matt asked where the restroom was and excused himself. The only other student in the room was a sweet-faced man wearing street clothes, sitting at one of the long tables where he was filling out paperwork and releases. The man looked up, his glasses reflecting the overhead light, and gave a little wave. “Hi, I’m Lenny.” This was my “enemy.”
“Have a seat,” Slick offered. I sat at one of the tables. He smiled at me but said nothing.
Matt returned from the bathroom, and Slick handed him some papers. “Just fill these out, initial right here, and sign the bottom.”
Classic. I smirked and cleared my throat. “Actually I’m the one flying today.”
He could barely conceal his surprise. “Oh! Okay, well, here you go.” He handed the sheets over to me.
While I was signing my life away Slick asked Matt, “So did you buy this for her as a present?”
“No, she bought it for herself.”
Another expression of bemusement.
“He’s just here for moral support,” I explained as Matt settled down with a book at the table behind me. Slick handed Lenny and me flight suits identical to his with American flag patches on the shoulder and long zippers up the middle spanning the neck to the nether regions.
As we headed to changing rooms to disrobe, he called after us, “It gets hot in the plane so you’re going to want to wear only your underwear beneath these suits.” Ground school had begun.
“Have either of you ever flown before?” Slick asked after we’d returned, suited up. I shook my head.
“I fly a lot of gliders,” Lenny said, referring to the engineless planes that are towed up into the sky by another plane and then cut loose to sashay across the wind currents. “But they only go about sixty miles per hour.”
“Today you’re going to be going two hundred and thirty miles per hour,” he said. “Here we fly Marchetti SF-260s, a plane used by several air forces around the world for fighter pilot training. These are the Ferraris of the sky. They’re light and easy to maneuver.”
He continued: “You and the instructor will be sitting side by side. Your control sticks operate together like the pedals in a driver’s-ed car. When you’re moving your stick, your instructor’s stick will move as well, and vice versa. That way he can take over the controls at any time if you get into trouble.” I glanced back at Matt, eyes wide. He gave a reassuring smile. When I turned back, Slick was holding up some kind of canvas sack with straps. It looked like a backpack from the 1800s.
“We’ve had over fifty thousand customers. We’ve never had a death, never had to use one of these parachutes,” he said. “But just in case there’s a fire in the cabin or a wing falls off . . .”
It can do that? Just FALL OFF?
“ . . . pull back the canopy and jump out of the plane. To open the chute, pull this D-ring right here.” I took note of the parachute knowing that I’d never have to use it, because if anything happened that necessitated getting out of the plane, I’d have long since gone into cardiac arrest.
According to Slick, something else we wanted to watch out for was “buffeting.” “Buffeting is when you feel the plane start to shake and you hear a loud continuous sound like BAH-BAH-BAH-BAH-BAH.” He shook his fists in the air for emphasis. “It means that there’s too little air pressure going underneath the wings and too much air pressure going over the top of the wings. It also means that the plane is about to stall.” I moved my foot over next to Matt’s, and he rubbed his shoe against mine.
Slick continued: “Now obviously when you’re in combat, you do whatever it takes to kill the enemy, but for our purposes we have some rules. First, three thousand feet is the ‘hard deck,’ meaning that if you go below that altitude you immediately forfeit the fight.”
“Hi there!” We were interrupted by a man in his early sixties sticking his head into the room.
“Lenny will be flying with me,” Slick said and then nodded at the other man, who was also wearing a flight suit. “Noelle, this is your instructor, call sign ‘Boom.’ ” Given my fear of crashing, I didn’t have a great deal of confidence in an instructor named Boom.
After he ducked out, I raised my hand. “How do we keep from crashing into each other?”
“That’s rule number two,” Slick said. “Head-on approaches are not allowed. You can only shoot your opponent from behind.” He took out two pencils, each with a tiny gray plastic plane perched on the end.
“F/A-18s!” Matt exclaimed, setting down his sci-fi book. “I used to build models of those when I was a kid.”
Slick nodded appreciatively. “This isn’t what you’ll be flying today, obviously, but they’ll do for demonstration purposes. Now the only time you’ll be facing each other is at the beginning of the dogfight.” He held up the planes, facing them toward each other, about ten inches apart. “You’ll fly toward each other, keeping your opponent on the left. As soon as you pass each other, we’ll say, ‘Fight’s on!’ Then you try to get behind the other plane and go in for the kill.” Using the pencil planes, Slick showed us some basic aerial maneuvers called “yo-yos” and “lead and lag.”
“At some point you might do this with the plane,” Slick said, making one of the plastic planes do a backflip.
Uh, you might do that with the plane, I thought to myself. My ass wasn’t doing anything remotely similar to that.
He continued: “When you do, it’s important that you go full throttle. Because if you half-ass the backflip or lose your nerve halfway through, your aircraft will do this.” The plane in his hand suddenly dropped and started plummeting toward the ground nose-first.
This was the point where I decided I wouldn’t be dogfighting. My plan was to get a few hundred feet off the ground, freak out, and demand to come down immediately. At the very most, I’d take over the controls and fly the plane straight for a few minutes and then ask Boom to take me back to the airport. A sense of peace came over me now that I’d chosen not to do this. Still, I felt bad for Lenny, who’d signed up expecting to have a dogfight with a fellow thrill seeker. Maybe after I was brought back down, Boom could go back up alone and show him a good time.
“G-forces!” Slick boomed out. “G-force is the acceleration of an object relative to free fall. A negative g-force occurs when the plane is in a dive. Your body feels lighter than it really is. A positive g-force occurs when your plane is going up, multiplying the force of gravity and making your body feel heavier than it really is. Positive g-forces push blood away from your head toward your feet and can result in tunnel vision and loss of consciousness.” In a two-g maneuver, my 125-pound body would feel like I weigh 250 pounds, at three gs I would feel like 375 pounds, and so on. At six gs, or 750 pounds, I would black out, which would probably be for the best.
The last thing he showed us was how to deploy the barf bag. Apparently, one out of ten customers vomited.
“The record is seven bags,” Slick said proudly. “Guy went to a buffet lunch before he got here.”
During the war, Eleanor lobbied strongly for starting a women’s flying division in the Army Air Force. She argued that if more women took on domestic aviation jobs, more male pilots could be released for combat. “This is not a time when women should be patient,” she wrote in 1942 in her newspaper column “My Day.” “We are in a war and we need to fight it with all our ability and every weapon possible. Women pilots, in this particular case, are a weapon waiting to be used.”
She also rallied behind African American airmen. In 1941, Eleanor visited the Tuskegee flying school in Alabama. Over the Secret Service’s objections, the fifty-seven-year-old First Lady flew with a black pilot for more than an hour. The pilot, C. Alfred Anderson, later wrote in his memoir, “She told me, ‘I always heard Negroes couldn’t fly and I wondered if you’d mind taking me up.’ . . . When we came back, she said, ‘Well, you can fly all right.’ I’m positive that when she went home, she said, ‘Franklin, I flew with those boys down there, and you’re going to have to do something about it.’ ”
There’s a fantastic photo of the two of them in the two-seater plane. Eleanor is in the backseat wearing a hat with flowers on it, grinning broadly. The youthful Anderson is in the front looking pleased but nervous. “Please, God, don’t let me kill this white lady,” his expression is saying. But her plan worked. The symbolic value of the white First Lady sitting behind a black pilot was immeasurable. According to Anderson, the Army Air Corps began training African Americans several days after Eleanor’s flight.
Boom and I were sitting side by side in adjacent airplane seats. The cockpit was small, like the front seat of a car, but with a clear plastic canopy over the top like the cars on The Jetsons. I’d just received a brief tutorial on how to fly. My instructions were few—don’t touch anything but the control stick. It had a red button under my thumb, which I could press to talk to Boom on the headset attached to my helmet. Another red button let me talk on the radio to the other plane. There was a red trigger on the front, connected to the dashboard’s computer. If you got the enemy plane (known as a bogey), in your gunsight and pulled the trigger, white smoke would come out of the tail, indicating a “kill.” Otherwise, the control stick operated exactly as you’d imagine—push it forward and the plane went down, pull it back and the plane went up, move it right and the right side of the plane tilted toward the ground and vice versa on the left.
The engine started with a succession of tdt-tdt-tdt-tdts and we were cruising down the runway. Charging. I was taking deep, calming breaths. We were up! I wasn’t scared at all, which was odd because this was my least favorite part of commercial flights since I knew that 80 percent of crashes occurred shortly after takeoff. Somehow this liftoff felt natural. The plane didn’t falter as it whirred over forest, sand, and then water, which blinked furiously under the unforgiving sunlight.
“So how long have you been flying?” I asked Boom.
“Spent twenty years in the navy. Flew attack missions in Vietnam. Then I went on to work for Pan-Am and a bunch of other places.”
Did these military guys ever resent their guest pilots? I wondered. People who wanted the thrill of battle but would never enlist themselves. Then to have them walk away at the end, shaking their heads in a self-satisfied manner, saying, “That was fun, but I’d never do it for a living.” Like the tourists who came to New York, fumbled around, asked us directions and if we’d mind taking their photo, and then left declaring, “New York is a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.” (What a coincidence! I’d always thought. I don’t want you living here either!)
“How did you get the call sign ‘Boom’?”
“I never tell a story without a drink in my hand,” he winked.
“I can respect that,” I said. “And, might I add, I’m glad you don’t have a drink in your hand.”
He laughed. I liked this guy.
“So do I get a call sign?” I asked.
“Oh, you’ll get one. At the end of the day.”
The plane faltered a bit and we dropped a few feet and then reared back up violently. My stomach seized.
“That’s just the prop wash,” Boom said dismissively. Flying through another plane’s wake, known as the wash, caused turbulence. And as I knew from last night’s viewing of Top Gun, it was flying through Iceman’s jet wash that had caused Maverick’s flat spin and the demise of much-beloved Goose.
“Will we be expecting any more of those?” I asked nervously, eyeing the portable life preserver Boom had clipped to my waist before takeoff “just in case.”
“Naw, probably not,” he said, but he put some distance between our planes nonetheless. We’d been in the air for less than ten minutes when he said, “Okay, you have the plane.” He let go of his control stick, palms facing out in one of those “look, Ma, no hands!” gestures.
“What?! Jesus!” The right wing started to drop, and I fumbled for my stick. I was filled with the same surprised indignation I’d felt when my dad taught me how to ride a bike. He’d been jogging along behind me, holding the back of my seat, and then without warning, he’d let go. “Stop it!” I’d shrieked. “Don’t let go!” But there had been little I could do because it had taken all my concentration not to crash the bike.
“See? You’re doing great!” Boom said as I struggled to even us out. The control stick was so sensitive that pushing it a millimeter was enough to move the aircraft.
When I was little, I liked to play on the seesaws at the neighborhood playground. Sometimes I’d stand in the middle of the seesaw, trying to balance both ends in the air at once. This was hard to do. I’d always end up putting too much weight on one foot, and when the seesaw started to drop on that side, I’d ease up and shift more weight to the other foot, and then that side would start to drop. This was what it was like trying to fly. I was trying to hold the control stick still, but the plane was somewhat cockeyed. So I nudged the stick slightly to the left. Too much! Back to the right again. The plane wobbled drunkenly. As I moved my control stick, I could see Boom’s stick move with it as though guided by an invisible hand.
“Now we’re a little high,” Boom cautioned. “Push forward on the nose a bit.” I urged the stick forward and the plane lurched. I overcompensated by pulling the nose up too fast. Eventually I straightened out. There was no way I was going to be able to dogfight. It was time to break the news to Boom.
“Um, I don’t think I’ll be able to, you know, do any tricks or go upside down or anything.”
Boom waved this off. “Don’t worry. When you’re dogfighting, you’ll be so focused you won’t even notice when you’re upside down.”
“Trust me, I’ll notice.”
“Now I want you to get behind Lenny and practice getting him in your crosshairs. During the dogfight, he’s going to be flying all over the place, so you won’t look for him through your gunsight. Look for him out in the sky, maneuver the plane toward him, and then line him up in your crosshairs.”
He added: “Always be looking for the bogey. Never lose sight of your enemy. You lose sight, you lose the fight.”
I steered the plane over to Lenny’s, and squinting one eye, I positioned him inside my orange circle with a cross in the middle. “Should I pull the trigger?” I asked.
“We’re not activated yet, but why the hell not? It’s emotionally satisfying.”
I pulled the red trigger with my pointer finger, making pew, pew, pew! sounds. It was satisfying.
“Okay, now I want you to do a barrel roll. You’re going to pull the control stick all the way to the left and keep going, flipping the plane over three hundred and sixty degrees.”
Panic surged through me. “Oh, I don’t think that’s a good idea!” My voice was uncharacteristically girlish and fluttery. “Really, I’m fine right here. Can we just hang out?”
“To the left, now! Go! Go! Go!” he barked militarily, leaving me no choice.
With a stream of expletives running through my head, I pulled the stick over until it was pressed against my left leg and could go no farther. We were turning. The flickering gray ocean beneath the plane was replaced by the steady seamless blue of the sky. I felt a pronounced, but not uncomfortable, pressure on my body. Then the water rotated back into view and we were right side up again.
“Pretty cool, huh?” Boom grinned.
It . . . was, actually, I marveled. I couldn’t believe I’d just done that. Now I understood how commanders got their soldiers to charge into battle. The human instinct to please could be more powerful than our survival instinct.
Boom had me hold the plane steady while we let Lenny practice getting me in his crosshairs.
“Time to dogfight!” Boom announced.
Oh no. There was no way out of this. Boom took the controls and steered me far away from Lenny and Slick’s plane. When we were a good distance apart, he turned the plane around so Lenny and I were facing each other. We were two gunslingers moving toward each other on the main street of a deserted town. As we closed in, I took great care to stay toward the right side.
“Fight’s on!” Slick’s voice crackled over the radio.
Fwoom! The planes passed, left wing to left wing. Instead of turning and engaging with Lenny, I kept going straight. Maybe I could just outrun him? I did have a head start. What this plane needs is a rearview mirror, I thought, looking over my shoulder to see how far behind he was. It was bizarre taking my eyes “off the road.” Then again, there was no one else up there that I could possibly crash into. Lenny was arching high across the sky, with obvious intentions to circle around behind me. Staring at the underbelly of his plane, wings jutting out like fins, I was reminded of scuba diving and how it felt to see a shark cruising overhead, knowing it was about to swoop down on me.
“Cut him off! Cut him off!” Boom shouted.
Cut him off? He wants me to cut off a plane? Using my plane?
“Bank left!” Boom ordered.
Cautiously, I eased the plane to the left.
“Harder! Harder!”
Clenching my teeth, I applied more pressure to the stick. The plane rolled violently sideways into a ninety-degree bank. The wings were completely vertical. I stole a glance out the left window. Eerily, all I saw was a wall of water.
“Tip the nose down!” he commanded.
I followed his order and suddenly we were dropping nose-first toward the ocean. My body felt empty. It was a horrible sensation.
“Oh, what’s happening?” I asked in a rising tone of alarm. “Can you jump in here, please?!”
Boom was unfazed. “No, you’ve got it.”
Instinctively, I pulled up on the nose and straightened out the plane, so that I was driving like a car, with the water beneath us. That was better.
“What are you doing? Don’t look where you’re going!” Boom reprimanded. “Look for the enemy!”
I blinked at him. The enemy?
“Lenny! Remember, lose sight, lose the fight!”
Right. Lenny. I braced my elbow on my headrest and shifted in my seat. I craned my neck, frantically scanning for a plane amid the blueness. Where the hell had he gone? You’d think he’d be easy to spot in an empty sky, but it was not like standing on a flat plain and looking for someone in the distance. He could’ve also been below me or above me.
Suddenly Lenny was upon us. While I had been struggling with the plane, he’d swung in behind and nailed me. White smoke poured out of my tail. The entire dogfight was over in a matter of minutes.
“Good kill,” Boom congratulated Lenny over the radio. Then he turned to me. “You’re doing a great job. Just remember, concentrate on watching the enemy, you can’t hurt the plane.”
“No offense, but I don’t give a crap about the plane. It’s me I’m worried about hurting!”
He chuckled good-naturedly. “As long as the plane is safe, you’re safe.”
We lined up for the second dogfight. This time around I was less nervous as we charged toward each other. We passed, left wing to left wing; then Lenny fanned out to the right and I went left. For a second I was unsure of what to do next.
Boom hollered, “He’s above us! Don’t let him get away. Pull back! Pull back all the way! Pull! Pull!”
Slowly but firmly, I drew the stick toward me until it could go no farther. The earth dropped away as I steered the plane straight up. We were in a high climb, crusading against gravity. All I could see was the white blue sky and Lenny. Something was happening. What was this? I was pinned back in my chair, slumped over to the right, head tilted so far that it was practically resting on Boom’s shoulder. I looked like someone should be wheeling me out during a telethon. The g-forces were so intense that I couldn’t lift my head, not even an inch. I couldn’t move anything.
“Keep pulling!” Boom was saying. I felt the g-forces coaxing the control stick out from under my fingers. If it popped out of my hand, we’d lose our thrust. All I could think of was the demonstration of what happened if you half-ass a backflip.
It was hard to speak, as if gravity was trying to keep the words down. In a feeble voice, I pleaded, “Help . . . me.” That was all I could manage.
To my relief, Boom took over the stick. He steered us behind the bogey, lined it up in the crosshairs, and squeezed the trigger. White smoke streamed forlornly out of Lenny’s tail. Boom hooted with pleasure. As he maneuvered the plane, I could only stare straight ahead. Clouds and ocean and sky twisted and turned in my eye line, as if through a kaleidoscope. Suddenly the pressure on my body ebbed. I could move again. I lifted my head and straightened in my seat and saw that we were flying right side up.
“Wow, that was intense,” I breathed.
Boom gave me a happy nudge. “Congratulations. You won!” he said graciously.
My face was stuck in a huge, goofy smile. I didn’t care that I hadn’t pulled the trigger, I still felt like I’d won. Holy shit, I thought, I’m actually doing this.
There is no such thing as “down” during dogfights, I realized. The sooner you wrapped your head around that, the more success you’d have. Down was whichever way your butt happened to be pointing at any given time. You couldn’t worry about where you were in relation to the ground. You had to keep your focus on the target.
“I got beat by a girl,” Lenny moaned over the radio. I snickered even though Boom made the kill. Let him live in ignorance.
I was fired up as our third and final dogfight began. Fwoom! Lenny was a blur as we raced past each other.
“Do you see him?” Boom prompted in that teachery tone that implied he knew the answer but wanted me to figure it out for myself. I twisted around in the cockpit, skimming the sky for the bogey.
“Wait, where is he? . . . Oh, I see him!” He was off on the left below us, turning around so he could get behind me.
I rolled the plane to the side with the nose low and began an inverted dive. The ocean twinkled happily in front of me as I dropped toward it, but it was a nonentity. I was so focused that all fear was gone. Dr. Bob had been right. As long as I concentrated on killing the enemy, I stopped worrying about what my plane was doing. The bogey was the only thing that existed right then. I dropped until I was below Lenny; then I twisted the opposite way and pulled my nose up, climbing back up to his level. Now I was behind the bogey, fixing him in my crosshairs.
“You got it. Fire! Fire!” Boom said. I squeezed the trigger and got off a few rounds, none of which connected.
Suddenly Lenny drifted out of the gunsight. I unsquinted my right eye and look out the window. Now he was above us, over my left shoulder, and about to give chase.
My eyes narrowed. Don’t even try it, bitch.
I did a high sweeping turn and pulled back on the control stick. My plane’s nose tilted upward and we were in a climb. I zoomed over after the bogey, determined to make the kill this time. I was closing in. Almost got it . . . almost . . . There was a loud banging sound and the wings started shaking. Buffeting. I was too steep. The airplane was about to stall. Fuck. Fucking fuck. I quickly shoved the nose forward and we tipped forward suddenly and it felt as though we were on the crest of a roller coaster so I jerked the nose back up. When I got the plane level again, I looked around for Lenny.
“Okay, where did he go?” I asked.
“He’s right behind us.”
“Oh no!” I cried. “How do I get away from him?!”
“You don’t,” Boom said flatly. “He just shot us.”
“Oh.”
“I think it’s about time to head home,” Boom said, taking back the controls.
Already? That was it? But I was just getting the hang of it! I wanted to try another barrel roll. I didn’t even care that I’d lost two of the three dogfights and that Boom had technically won mine for me. I had flown! Not only flown, but fought in air-to-air combat. And I hadn’t freaked out or cried or asked to go home. I’d maintained possession of my stomach contents. I felt myself glowing. I could do anything. Anything. I was a warrior. Boom steered us in the direction of the flight school.
“Do you want to fly again?” he asked.
I nodded enthusiastically.
“Okay, you have the plane.”
I was in the lead. I glanced over my right shoulder and saw Lenny following on my wing. He was less than ten feet away, but I was at full throttle so I couldn’t speed up and put distance between us. Why is he so close? Step off, Lenny! Oh, he’s taking a picture of me. While he’s driving. That can’t be safe. Still, I grinned and gamely gave him the thumbs-up, just so he’d turn his attention back to navigating. He took the photo, gave me a thumbs-up in return, and dropped back a little. When the airport bobbed into view, Boom took back the controls. We had to separate the planes so we could land.
“Say good-bye,” Boom instructed me.
I pressed the radio button and said, “Byyyyeeeeeee—” but the word turned into a squeal when Boom banked sharply to the left.
“A little notice next time?” I asked.
He laughed and continued circling around toward the opposite end of the runway. We were maybe five hundred feet off the ground when the plane began to buck. Boom took a firmer hand with the control stick, wrestling with the beast.
“Thermal turbulence,” Boom explained. “Caused by hot air rising off the earth. It’s always worst in the afternoon when the ground is the hottest.”
The plane was jerking, dipping. We were slaloming toward the landing strip. For the first time that day I was genuinely afraid for my safety. Instinctively I grabbed the bottom of my seat with my hands, but remembering my conversation with Dr. Bob, I immediately let go. An alarm in the cabin buzzed relentlessly: Eh! Eh! Eh!
Boom started flipping switches furiously. Oh shit. Something was wrong. After all that, only to be killed on the return? I cased the woods to our left. If we crashed into the treetops, maybe they’d soften our landing? No, it was going to be one of those fiery affairs, I could tell. Black smoke corkscrewing into the sky. Firefighters in silver suits. Local news helicopters muscling in for the best aerial shot to capture the carnage. Or maybe the force of the crash would eject me, Goose-like, from the plane? Only I would break through the Marchetti’s flimsy canopy. “Are you sure there were two pilots?” the first officer on the scene would ask Slick. “There was only one body.” They’d find me a week later lodged in one of the trees. Dental records would be procured for identification purposes, my face having already been eaten by wildlife.
Eh! Eh! Eh! Boom was still fumbling, not telling me what was going on.
Matt had been so cute earlier taking pictures of me—the last photos!—before we’d taken off. After I was gone, there would be newspaper stories about me and the project, the sad irony of it all. It would scare the shit out of readers. Inadvertently, I would uninspire thousands. They’d take to their couches, eschewing bravery for television sitcoms and cop shows. I’d be the anti–Eleanor Roosevelt.
The noise stopped and Boom settled back in his chair. I exhaled with relief. In retrospect, the whole thing had lasted less than ten seconds.
“That was the automatic landing gear alarm,” he explained. “If you go below a specific altitude and you’ve forgotten to lower the wheels, it lets you know.” I could hear the wheels whirring into position. He chuckled. “Sometimes the plane is smarter than we are.”
“I’m glad you didn’t tell me that before we took off.”
The wheels eeeaaaaked onto the runway. As we were taxiing, Boom ripped back the canopy and, without realizing it, bonked me mightily on the head.
“Doesn’t that feel good!” he exclaimed into the breeze.
As we rolled to a halt and climbed out of the cockpit I spotted Matt waiting off to the side on the runway. When he saw that I was grinning and not in need of sedation, he pulled out a video camera and peppered me with questions.
“Would you do it again?” he asked.
“I would, actually!” It was slightly embarrassing to admit. I’d spent weeks worrying and whining about this one hour. The scariest thing I’d done in my life so far turned out not to be all that scary—fun even. It made me wonder what else I was missing out on. Also, what other things in my life was I unnecessarily wasting time and energy worrying about?
“Was it scary?” Matt asked as I climbed down the wing.
“Nah,” I said, then qualified: “Well, maybe a little during the landing . . .”
Matt took pictures of Boom and me, then of the two of us standing with Lenny and Slick in front of my plane.
“Can I get a few more shots of you two in front of the tail end?” Matt asked Boom. “Would you mind?”
“Take as much time as you want. We get all sorts of crazy requests,” Boom said. “We’ve had women strip down to bikinis and pose lying on top of the plane. Someone else had us take a picture while she did a handstand on the wing.”
Later, after we’d said our good-byes, I opened the car door to find a paper plate on my seat with half of a funnel cake on it. “I went to the car show next door,” Matt said sheepishly. “Saved you some!” As he negotiated our way back onto the Long Island Expressway, I paused while licking the sugar off my fingers.
“Hey wait, I never got my call sign!”
“What?”
“Boom told me I’d get my fighter pilot nickname at the end of the day. He must have forgotten.”
“So call him and ask.”
I winced. I never liked calling strangers—a ridiculous admission for a former reporter, I know. Even as a kid, it had taken years before I could comfortably order a pizza. It got much better as I got older; then e-mail and texting arrived like manna from heaven for the telephone challenged. In the last few years, especially, as my life shifted even more toward writing and the Internet, I’d regressed to being the child who wished I could ask a parent to call on my behalf.
I picked up the phone to call Boom several times over the next week. In the end, I chickened out. I went to the Air Combat USA website, e-mailed the webmaster and got Boom’s e-mail address from her. After a few throat-clearing lines of “hey, remember me?,” I finally asked the question: “So what’s my call sign?”
A few days later I received a reply. “Despite your initial quavers, ya done good,” Boom wrote. “Aggressive to the point where I had to throw a leash on you to keep from overextending. Hence, from henceforth, in fighter pilot circles, you shall be known as Fearless. Hope you do fly with me again, because afterward the cry will be, ‘Fearless, you’re buying the beer!’ ”
For a few moments, I just stared at the e-mail, smiling. I’d felt like a bit of a coward for e-mailing instead of calling, but now I was grateful that I could keep this conversation forever. Still, I wanted to atone for my sin. I picked up the phone, and when the person on the other line picked up, I said, “Mom? You won’t believe the e-mail I just got . . .”