Flying Lessons

I flew with a student today. He was practicing instrument flying which meant that he focused on flying by the instruments in the panel and he never looked outside of the aircraft. I (on the other hand) got to look out the airplane for the entire hour and a half. Funny how two people can be sitting so close and having entirely different experiences.

While his focus never got further than twenty-four inches, my focus was completely outside the airplane (my first priority was to watch where we were going.) I could see the foliage for about twenty miles around. Reds, oranges, shades of green. In one sea of brilliant oranges a bright yellow tree stood out by itself in a perfect circular shape - like a punctuation mark.

I was able to watch the sunset - seeing the reflections of the orange tinted clouds and blue sky in the local rivers and lakes. The air was so still on the surface that the bodies of water were like mirrors reflecting images back into the sky. After the sun set the clouds turned gray. The reflections changed from light blue and orange to deep blue and dark gray. It's no wonder so many people want to fly for a living…

The student continued to watch the instruments as night fell. Guided by the navigation equipment he flew us back to the airport, finally taking off his goggles when the plane was a half mile from the runway and four hundred feet above the ground. For him, the first sight out the windscreen after ninety minutes was the bright shining sea of lights at the airport - reds, greens, yellows and blue. A mesmerizing sight at the end of the trip, but nothing compared to the views he'd passed up along the way.