Getting It

I've been flying for forty years and understood how airfoils worked from about age 6, maybe earlier. But all that experience and knowledge didn't do diddly for me watching a 500 ton 747 levitate off a runway and head for the heavens; the spectacle defied every common sense neuron in my head: how could something that massive stay in the air? I'd try to explain it, as much to myself as to others, by using analogies like 10,000,000 birds all flying in close formation, or that if the 747 were shrunk to 1/100th its size and its weight kept proportional the resulting two foot wingspan model would weigh only 1 pound, something so light its flight could be easily imagined, but such thought experiments did nothing to turn the sight of a 747 aloft into anything other than stupefying magic. My brain got it, but I didn't.

On a blistering hot August day a few weeks ago we fetched a Piper back from avionics repair and after an hour in that sunbaked cockpit about two thirds of the way home my associate said "stick your hand out the vent window and get some air over here I'm dyin'". The tiny eight square inch flap of hinged plexiglass is more of a placebo on a Piper than a true vent; we'd had it open since starting the engine but the interior temperature climbed as if it hadn't been there at all. I stuck my hand out and got a good blast of air streaming in, and, after 40 years, got it.

It was like putting my hand into wet concrete. Our airspeed was only about 130 MPH but air at that speed takes on a solid consistency that you can squeeze with your fingers like clay. And my common sense neurons finally got it. There's no magic to flying; it's sledding on a substance solid as packed snow.

If 130 MPH felt like wet cement, 550 MPH is the hardened and cured product, and no one should have any difficulty imagining a 500 ton machine sliding effortlessly on a surface solid as a concrete highway.

The means, of course, that the rock solid cushion the airplane rides on must also be pushed through, and that wall of resistance is just as solid in front of the airplane as it is beneath it, so getting through it takes beaucoup power. A Boeing 777 is as powerful as four Queen Mary ocean liners.

I've flown in open cockpits and stuck my hand into the slipstream countless times in the last 40 years; why this one time it finally clicked I can't say. But it's definitely satisfying having my mind and my gut finally in alignment.

And if it took me four decades to finally truly "get" something in a field I've devoted my life to understanding, in how many other areas are we all still out of synch; our minds sure of one thing, but our hearts not yet on board? That's a philsophical conundrum whole lifetimes may never overcome.