First Flight

 

First Flight

 

I miss flying. Since COVID I haven’t flown. In fact, I haven’t gone anywhere. Two vacation trips cancelled.They were the drive to kind so no cancelled flights. The days of hopping on a jet and off to some exotic place are a thing of the past. Who wants to get on a large cigar tube filled with coughing people exchanging carbon dioxide for a couple of hours?

 

Not long ago, I read that an Australian airline was offering a four hour flight to nowhere. You could buy a ticket at full price, grab a seat, enjoy all the amenities of first class and be back home that afternoon. No really, this is true and there were immediate sold out flights. The advertisement was for those who longed to fly again even if you weren’t going anywhere.

 

That brought to mind my first plane ride. I was a Boy Scout, and our scoutmaster organized a plane ride from Minneapolis Wold-Chamberlin Field to Rochester, Minnesota, a distance of 89 mile. It was a one way trip on a noisy prop Northwest Airlines plane. What a treat that was. I still remember the roaring of the engines, the shaking of the whole plane and the thrust of takeoff. I had never seen earth from ten thousand feet. It was an adventure of a lifetime. Not so much on the Greyhound bus ride back home.

 

Since then, I’ve been on many aircraft but none as memorable as that first one. I have flown to the UK, Kenya, South Africa, Mexico, Costa Rica, Australia, Holland, Israel, Jamaica and all over the USA. Big jets and small ones. I even sat in the co-pilot’s seat on a short flight from Seattle to Victoria, B.C. It was a sea plane piloted by a young lady wearing a flight jacket, wrap around aviator sunglasses and a white silk scarf. I think she took a shinning to me.

 

Not sure when I will get back up in the wild blue yonder. No matter, I still have that memory as a young boy, scared to death, on his first airplane. By the way, I sat in coach. That’s where I usually end up!