Inside Out: Trying to find the right words to capture flight

I’ve had a lifelong writing challenge that I’ve never managed to meet: put down the right words to make non-flyers get the same feeling about flying and airplanes that I do.

Flying is amazing to me. Airplanes are so beautiful they choke me up. Boy, I hated to see that Piper Seneca banged up after a bad landing at Klenawicus some weeks back. It was like seeing Seabiscuit down on the track.

I’ve tried and failed to write successfully about flying many times — enough to have given up trying for a while. Sure, I can put down the words and tell about flying — but I have yet to do it in a way that can make someone else feel how grand it is to sit alone in a Cessna, feet on the rudder pedals, hand on the throttle, and taxi into position for takeoff and see that runway stretched out in front of me telling me, “You’re on. Go claim the sky; it’s all yours.”

I’ve never been able to recreate in words the feeling I get making a perfect 90-degree turn from base leg to final approach, unbanking smoothly at a fixed roll rate with the airplane tracking right along the centerline, its nose angled perfectly so many degrees left or right to compensate for the crosswind as it descends at the perfect rate and angle to the threshold at 1.2 times stall speed. Hold the centerline with aileron, back on the yoke to begin the round out, keep the nose straight with rudder, flare, hold it hold, hold it off, and plunk. Wheels on.

So many things go into flying well, and there are so many factors that make any particular flight an aesthetic success or failure, that I can barely scratch the surface. And explaining it all doesn’t necessarily achieve my goal: to make a non-flying reader get what makes it all so ceaselessly satisfying to me.

There are many articles, books, movies and photos that capture part of the magic. But I can think of only one creative effort that really begins to get to the heart of flying’s allure.

Of all things, it’s a new TV commercial for General Electric jet engines. For me to cite a commercial for its artistry is a bit like a Tea Party person praising Obama for his smooth style. I think marketing has become so pervasive that we’ve all become zombies controlled by corporations.

But I love GE’s ad. I don’t care that, some slow day at the office, a neuron may fire in my medulla oblongata that makes me want to go out and buy a GE90 115D jet engine. I wouldn’t get far with that obsession. I don’t think you can buy jet engines anywhere on the Island, except maybe Fedi’s or Jack’s. And I drive a two-door coupe. No room in the trunk.

The ad is about the people who put together GE’s jet engines, blade by blade, and the pride they take in what they do. They talk about their sense of wonder when it comes to airplanes and their own roles in making them fly. One of them says, “We lift people up off the ground to 35,000 feet in the air.” Another says, “We make jet engines and I think the inner nerd in me is really excited about that.” Another says, “It’s going to fly people around the world.”

And another says, “I would love to see this thing fly.”

And he does. Cut to a lineup of these same engine workers on the tarmac — probably at Boeing Field outside Seattle.  They’ve been taken on a field trip to see the first flight of a new 747 airframe as it effortlessly (so it looks) takes to the sky. They watch with pride and in awe. One looks a little verklempt and, as the Boeing climbs so nobly away, wipes away a tear.

I love the comment one of the workers makes about seeing her colleagues in the big jet with its roaring engines.

I’ve never seen or read anything that captures the wonder of flight and the human spirit, which can soar just like that lovely airplane above all the forces of nature that conspire to run it to ground.

You can see a version of the ad on YouTube. Search for “GE Stories: Aviation.”

No, I have no GE stock.

Now, if I could just find a way to capture in words the same vibes that GE manages to pack into its little video, I’d be on my way to the literary pantheon where Ernie Gann sits whistling “The High and the Mighty” and Richard Bach watches Jonathan Livingston Seagull work the wind.