Flight to the Ground

Flight to the Ground

Man has been fascinated by flight since the beginning of time. Leonardo da Vinci imagined the helicopter, and proposed a model for a hang-glider. As I consider the airplanes flying through the air, I wondered about how much they weigh. A Boeing 737 weighs 83 thousand pounds, but has a take-off weight ability to carry 154 thousand pounds. It carries 6800 gallons of fuel. The plane is 110 feet long, and 117 feet wide. One hundred and thirty-seven people can fly on the on a 737.

The specifications seem like empty numbers, but when I see thousands of pounds of people, metal and jet fuel streaking across the sky, it simply amazes me. I don’t know the engineering and design that gets us from a short flight at Kitty Hawk to a daily routine where thousands of planes land every day without incident. Flying is an exciting, exhilarating adventure, unless you are flying so much it becomes mundane. I was sitting next to a businessman on my first flight, and he was asleep before the flight took off. I couldn’t believe how beautiful it was to fly through the clouds, and I took dozens of pictures through the small side window. The businessman slept the entire flight.

I like flying so much I’ve spent a good deal of my time flying through the air to the ground, without the plane. One time I flew backwards from a six-foot wooden ladder. I was painting the ceiling in the carport, which has since been made into a garage. But standing at the top of the ladder is never a good idea, and as I held the paint cup in my right hand and painted with my left, my wife came home and told me how good I was doing. As I wobbled slightly, the ladder flew away from my feet. I started to fall backwards, with my feet staying up and my head started down, and as I performed a backward somersault, I grasped the paint cup firmly. I did not let go of that cup. I was determined to hold it as I fell. This means paint flew from the cup in a perfect circle around me, across the roof, across my car which was parked behind me, and on the concrete. A beautiful white circle described the path of my perfectly executed backward somersault. There was even a white line of paint on my wife. She was worried about me, of course, but since I was okay, she was not very happy when I told her she needed to go wash the latex paint from her clothes.

I learned how to do back-flips by practicing on a rubber inner-tube. I would bounce up and try to spin backwards, usually landing on my head. But since I’m pretty hard-headed anyway, I eventually learned how to do it. So when I fell off the ladder, those old instincts kicked in, and I didn’t get hurt. The same thing happened one day at school. I was walking on the stage, and just behind me was a set of five or six stairs. As I walked backward, I went backward down the stairs, and did another back-flip. Students were standing on the stage in front of me and saw me tumble backwards. They were momentarily concerned until I popped up from the floor and declared I was all right. It really is a strange kind of talent, but it probably has saved some broken bones. But I wouldn’t recommend this course of training for anyone else.

I’ve also flown to the ground from the top of a fifteen foot ladder. Again, the ladder flew away from me since it was leaning on a grape arbor which decided to collapse. I fell to the ground this time without doing a somersault, this time landing flat on my back. Amazingly no serious injury was done, except to my pride. I was painting again, and this time I painted the side of the house green. I went into the house, took some ibuprofen and laid down to rest.

I even had a dream about the next time I flew through the air. I wanted to put more Christmas lights on the walnut tree in the front yard. I had a dream I fell out of the tree while putting up lights, and while I’m not a great believer in dreams as prognostication, I should have paid attention. Maybe I was just spooked, but it happened just as I had dreamed it. I fell and broke the fibula in my right leg. It took three x-rays and about six hours in the emergency room, and the doctor confirmed I had a hairline fracture. He suggested I go home and take some ibuprofen. I still like to fly.

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