The year 2020 has been a nightmare. Strike that. It’s been a layering of nightmares, each of which complicates the other. For some of us, it’s worse than for others, but it’s safe to say that, collectively, we can’t wait for the bad stuff to be in the rearview, in essence to flip the script and be able to say that 2020 is hindsight.
I’m so disappointed about missing Oshkosh this year. It’s my favorite week of the year. In fact, I usually stretch it out to closer to two weeks. It’s the planes, in large part, but it’s so much more than that, too. It’s the people I’ll miss most. There will be a lot of hugs and a lot of stories at OSH in 2021.
But we have a ways to go before we get there. As much as we’d like to believe that if we pretend hard enough COVID-19 will go away, it won’t. And it will continue to make life in the air a lot more complicated in a lot of ways for some time to come.
But we’ll survive. It’s what we do. Take a blow, shake it off, get back on our feet and get back to what we do, fly. That said, there’s been a lot less flying lately, though GA will be fine. The prospects for airline pilots, on the other hand, are dim. And I think that we have no idea how dynamic and strange the next year or two or three might be. If a vaccine and/or really effective treatment comes along quickly and people are ready to start flying again, the airlines will be leaving a lot of money on the table while they try to regroup. And training and retraining pilots is not only expensive, very expensive, but it takes time, too. Simulators run 24/7. There’s zero reserve in that department. And with more senior pilots taking early retirement or getting furloughed, the prospects for new pilots, once passengers start filling planes again, are very real.
As I’ve written, GA hasn’t changed as much. Small planes aren’t all that different from small cars. If we’re not flying for a while, the payments (if any), insurance premiums and hangar rent still come, due on the first of every month, but getting back into business is dead simple. Get current, do an extra-good preflight, and it’s back to the wild blue. Many pilots of personal planes are already back at it. Some never slowed down.
Still, GA has been hit as an industry. Sales are down. Flying hours, and hence fuel sales, are down, too. Both will recover, and some folks have suggested that the pandemic and airline downturn will prompt many folks to buy a plane and start flying. That isn’t really the way it works, as we know, but there could be a boost in plane sales, though used planes will continue to dominate the market for a while still, especially as great new retrofit avionics become available.
My job, which I love, is helping create content about aviation, and that mission hasn’t changed—except that, in a way, it’s changed fundamentally. No one’s interested in my views on social change and health policy, except as it relates to aviation, as it seldom does. But despite aviation’s remove from the day-to-day life on terra firma, things have changed for everyone, and it’s not just me. I’m hearing this same thing from so many of my friends. Our perception of what is important has shifted. Family and duty and honor and responsibility have always been important to me, and, now that I think about it, to all of my friends as well. How is it that today those things seem so much more important than ever? But they do.
A writer for ESPN, which is in the business of covering sports that aren’t being played, said it early on in the coronavirus pandemic. Referring to a column he had penned just a week earlier, he said, “Back when basketball still seemed important!” Again, the guy is a sports writer, but he was acknowledging the truth: Our perspective had changed overnight.
Making a better world for future generations has always been important to almost every aviation writer I know, and flying can do that. By sharing opportunity and inspiration, which is a big part of the job, we can help young people see themselves one day in the driver’s seat of an F-22 or perhaps the left seat of a PA-32. Unless you know about a possibility, it doesn’t exist for you. Flying is all about possibilities and making them real.
Flying is the thing that lets us live life better. It lets us head up to see mom as she gets older, visit the kid away at school, meet up with great old friends at that lake house. It’s also a way to connect with nature. We can go places in planes we simply can’t go without them. I’ve meandered the length of the Mississippi, I’ve popped into desert strips (and not quite strips) to spend time with rocks and rattlesnakes. I’ve, on many more than one occasion, flown a hundred miles for barbeque. Flying gives you access to experiences you simply don’t have as a groundling and that the airlines can’t come close to providing.
But it’s more than that, too. There’s something essential that we access when we fly. I’ve come close when 500 feet up a sheer cliff. And running marathons, strangely enough, is exhilarating. But there’s nothing like flying that I’ve ever done that hits upon that connection to joy so squarely and so reliably.
I love flying, and I’ve been doing it my entire life. I can’t remember a time I wasn’t either getting hauled around in airplanes or flying them myself. I love the spirit of innovation and freedom and democracy that little airplanes… “represent” is the wrong word…that little airplanes “embody.”
The feeling that pilots know is this: You’re up in a plane and so high above the world, looking at our planet and our lives in a way that nobody without a small plane ever gets to experience, and then, especially when you’re alone, you think, “My goodness, what an amazing thing it is that I am doing right now!” Your face lights up, your heart does too, and your very soul feels as though it is developing lift, free of the drudgery of living life with gravity. That is, of course, totally non-scientific, but it describes the feeling I get when I fly. That’s why people are so stupidly gaga about flying. It’s that amazing.
And the more people who get a chance to experience this kind of joy, the better. The world needs flying today more than it ever has.
