Today I flew an airplane. A real one, with me and 3 other people inside. It was incredible.<\/p>\n
There is a local flight instructor who will let people take up and fly one of his planes for an hour, for a reasonable fee. (The instructor handles the actual landing part, which I was just fine with.) Our roommate Starr thought that would be a grand birthday present for me, and after delays caused by holiday and weather, I took the Piper Warrior into the air. Hampton Roads is pretty amazing from up there; Norfolk and Virginia Beach seem like one contiguous urban area when you drive through them, but are quite discrete from 2000 feet.<\/p>\n
Working the yoke and the rudder pedals at the same time is a little more difficult than I’d expected, though I did get compliments from the instructor relating to my basic knowledge of planes and aerodynamics. He said that even a couple hours on Microsoft Flight Simulator or the equivalent saves him a great deal of explanation during one of these “discovery flights”.<\/p>\n
Of course, the deal is partially an attempt for the instructor to sell me $6000 worth of pilot’s license training. I’m not saying I wouldn’t like the idea, and I might do so in the future… but not right now.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, the idealist in me had a grand time. In 1903, the Wright Brothers made their historic flight; just over 100 years later, a Trek geek with a few bucks (or with a friend with a few) can take a plane into the sky and fulfill the dreams of thousands of his ancestors.<\/p>\n
It’s easy to forget how surrounded we are by miracles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today I flew an airplane. A real one, with me and 3 other people inside. It was incredible. There is a local flight instructor who will let people take up and fly one of his planes for an hour, for a reasonable fee. (The instructor handles the actual landing part, which I was just fine […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1xCb9-9o","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}