We have realized the dream for three generations, now.

It was first made possible by the war, when his maternal grandfather trained in the then-ubiquitous Stearman bi-plane and later flew both the B-17 Flying Fortress and the P38 Lightning in the Army Air Corps. His paternal grandpa—my dad—flew Marine F4U Corsairs and A-4 Skyhawks and A-6 Intruders and the EA-6B Prowler and then F-4 Phantom IIs. I, as a civilian, flew the normal assortment of Cessnas and Pipers and Beechcraft, with a Grumman Tiger, a SIAI-Marchetti SF.260 and a couple of helicopters thrown in. And today, my son Cade flew a Piper Archer on his solo; his first flight by himself.

Each of our generations had a different “external” reason for becoming pilots; the explanation we give acquaintances at parties. The first generation—born only a few years after the Wright Brothers pioneered powered flight—flew machines purpose-built for death and destruction, to protect life and liberty and uphold a bold new way of life. I fly as a necessary means of transportation between work and family locations hundreds of mile apart. Cade, my youngest, is flying to begin a career moving people across continents and oceans.

But the real reason we fly is because we can’t not fly.

The dream of flight is ancient, as old as Homo sapiens and probably a few predecessors. Since reasonably sentient beings looked up and saw birds (or, perhaps, Pterodactyls), we have wondered what it would be like to look down on the earth from an airborne perspective; to roam without having to navigate the obstacles attached to the ground.

We fly for the convenience and time savings, for the distant locations made accessible and for whatever glamour still exists in commercial air travel. As much fun as a transoceanic cruise might be (Titanic, anyone?), flying is the way we go when we have to be somewhere.

But none of that is the point, here.

We fly, we pilots, because there is something primitive and vital and necessary about flying and without it we are incomplete. We endure the learning and memorizing and regulatory pronouncements and training necessary for us to strap our otherwise bound-to-the-firmament bodies to miraculous machines that enable us to slip the surly bonds.

We think about flying when we’re not, we anxiously await our next chance to move tons of machine through the atmosphere, and if we are forced to be ground-bound for any length of time, we mourn.

We know that there are risks to our obsession. As has been repeated for decades, pilots are aware that, “Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity, or neglect.” And—if we are to fly for any length of time—we respect the care needed to leave the ground and live to tell the tales. The reward is many-fold worth the risk: none of us gets out of here alive, but we will be damned if we get out of here without tasting self-directed flight.

Not all who fly are flyers.

There are plenty of people who fly because they have to. These are the people who close the window shades, put on their headphones, take a Benadryl/Ativan/vodka cocktail and hope to be unconscious until they have to deplane. For many, flying isn’t just uninteresting, it’s unpleasant. And yes, there are a few pilots for whom flying is merely the best-for the-moment career choice: good pay and benefits and less than 40-hour weeks, in most cases.

But they are not us.

We are a different breed, almost a different species; proof, perhaps, that man once bred with dragons in the long ago. We want to peer into cockpits when we are not flying the thing ourselves. We covet the window seats like Gollum with his ring. We eschew music for the rare gift of listening to ATC chatter when we are forced into the role of passenger.

I realize that this ode to flight and flyers is thus far simultaneously hopeless and redundant: If you are one of us, you already know all this instinctively, in your very essence. If not, well…you wouldn’t understand.

And so we come to a typically beautiful afternoon in San Diego, at a typically hyper-busy small airport. The sun is shining and the wind is 280 at 09 gusting to 17…er, I mean…blustery. The pattern is so full of aircraft that at first glance it looks like someone has thrown confetti into the airspace. When I tune into the control tower frequency, the controllers are frantically trying to outpace each other in their peculiar clipped and repetitive robot-speak.

This time I am outside the fence, as I have been many other times for many years. I am standing on a concrete pillar in this particular corner of this particular parking lot because it is the closest I can get to the runway and I need to be able to see over the fence. You see, there is a sacred and irreplaceable event about to take place. It can only happen once and if I miss it, it is gone forever.

I know this specific loss from the other side and I will not let it happen again.

On a cold February day in a different town, 46 years ago, I was about to make my first solo flight. My dad—the Marine aviator I introduced to you earlier—knew I was going to solo and was ready to leave his work in a nearby town to witness the event. He also knew I was flying a tiny Cessna 152 and the wind was blowing nearly 40 miles an hour, far too strongly for even an experienced aviator to safely pilot the tiny trainer, no less a fledgling like me. So he stayed at work and planned to come out when the flight was rescheduled for a day when it was sane to fly.

My flight instructor, however, had other plans. I arrived at the airport—infamous for extreme wind conditions—at the prearranged time, crestfallen that I had psyched myself up to earn my wings and would surely be turned away.

“Well,” he said, “it’s been like this every time you’ve flown so far; might as well get used to it.” So we went around the pattern once together, me crabbing sideways into the wind to stay in alignment with the runway and then touching down on one wheel (“Gotta be a bush pilot up here,” he noted). When we stopped by the hangar, he got out and said, “Ok. Give me three good ones,” and started back inside where it was warm.

As I took off, I was acutely aware of two events, etched in my memory as if it was yesterday: As the tiny bird climbed skyward, my first realization was that there was no one sitting next to me. In the back of my mind, a tiny voice said, “If you mess up, you die.” But I had no fear, as I knew the totality of my 13.2 hours of experience would see me through.

My second realization came as I glanced down at the receding airfield and saw the airport manager leap out of his car and run up to my instructor on his way back to the hangar. I was glad I couldn’t hear the conversation, but even as I was bouncing around in the turbulence I got the gist of the interaction.

I did my three landings—under the watchful eye of the manager, who was riveted to the spot I first saw him—and taxied back to the hangar. When I crawled out of the airplane, I learned two things in rapid succession. First, my flight instructor had been fired on the spot. Second, I should have known, even as a student, to tell the now unemployed instructor he was crazy, because the wind exceeded the theoretical safe landing limits of the little plane.

I had soloed and my father had missed it. And he died before I got my license, so I never had the chance to fly him, with me as pilot-in-command.

And that brings us back to standing on a piece of concrete next to a fence, many hours away from my house. There was no force in the universe that was going to keep me from this event, this very real baptism of the next-in-line aviator in our bloodline of flyers.

I watched as Cade went around the pattern once with his instructor—after being delayed a while because the wind was too strong—then disappeared from my site as he returned to his flight school.

“I just dropped off my instructor!” said the text that popped up on my phone, and over the radio I heard him call for clearance to taxi for take-off. Soon after, his blue-and-white airplane turned the corner and started towards the end of the runway. He passed me maybe 20 yards away and I saw him wave from my perch on the concrete by the fence.

He stopped the plane and did the standard pre-takeoff checklist, then I heard him call the tower for clearance to take off. The controller cleared him and a few seconds later, the aircraft began to roll—with only Cade aboard, for the first time—quickly picking up speed into the wind.

I was pumping my fist in the air as the Archer left the ground for the first of three perfect trips around the field, each with a textbook landing. I’m sure he didn’t hear me yell, “Fly, son!” but I think he might have felt it.

And while my son was alone—as one must be, in these rites of passage—there were two other aviators next to me with their fists in the air, unseen but damned sure not going to miss another of us earn his wings.

(The actual moment of Cade's first solo take-off)

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- JWW