The Flying Lesson

For fun today, I decided to try to remember the first time I ever flew a ship.

The photo for this post is sort of close to the ship. It was a shuttle, and instead of being all pewter like above, it was silver and orange. The profile isn't quite right, but it's as close to the general idea as I could get. Not a disc. Like a little plane.

Anyway, this was the first time I was allowed to sit at the controls and fly the ship all by myself (with supervision). This is like that moment your father lets you sit in the driver's seat of the truck and back it down the driveway then drive it down the road a little bit. Same scenario, only I'm sitting in the pilot's seat instead of the driver's seat.

So, I'm 9 years old here, and dad is in the seat to my back left. The shuttle seats four in a diamond formation. The pilot sits up front, then there's two seats immediately behind on each side, then the last seat towards the rear of the cockpit. The seats are like bucket seats in a racing car. They're really comfortable, except they are designed to cushion you and hold you in place more, and there are controls around the arms.

Thank goodness I don't need my legs to fly the craft, because I'm too small for my feet to touch the floor. Dad helps me put the harness on, and that's comically big, but he's not about to let me fly this thing without being strapped in. Then he straps himself in. He says, "When you're ready, píp." He calls me píp...it means...fledgling. But more than just that. It means young bird generally, but he loads it to also mean a talkative baby bird that gets itself in trouble in the nest and wants to jump out first.

Sounds about right.

There's a button on the console in front of me, and I push and hold it. There are two concentric rings around it. Inside ring cycles, and the lights come on. Outside ring cycles and the shuttle starts to hum. And it's on. In front of my right hand there's a control, like a D-ring, where the straight part reminds me of a throttle for a motorcycle. I grab it, and I have to lean forward to get a good grip because my arms are short.

On the left side of the pilot's seat there are 6 buttons in the arm. They glow electric blue so you can find them in the corner of your eye, each a slightly different hue.

Dad reminds me I have to lift up off the ground first, so I push a button next to the start up button, and I can feel a gentle lurch and we're hovering slowly up off the ground.

It's a beautiful sunny day, and where the ship was parked are giant pine trees on all sides. For some reason, the ship is facing the trees instead of away like it usually would be. I'm supposed to wait for the ship to clear the trees, but it's taking soooo long for the ship to rise in altitude. I'm antsy. I want to fly. Without meaning to, I pull back on the D-ring control and the ship starts to drift forward into the trees. We're almost to the tops of them, but now I'm going right for them.

"Up, up, up!" dad is saying. And I rotate my right hand towards me and the ship tilts up. The tops of the trees make a scraping sound on the bottom of the shuttle.

"Sorry!"

"Keep going up!" Because now there two extremely tall trees right next to each other. "Up, up, up, up!"

"I'm not going to make it."

"Doesn't matter, keep going up!"

"I'm not going to make it!"

We're not going to make it. I'm going to smash right into those trees if I don't do something else. I rotate the control so it's perpendicular to the floor, and the ship is now perpendicular to the ground. And now I'm sideways and screaming and feeling queasy because the whole world is sideways and there's the branches of the trees headed right for the cockpit window. Dad can't get up, because now he's sideways and he's strapped in besides.

There's a soft shushing sound as the needles brush the shuttle, and we're through the trees.

"Level us out," dad says. Shakily, I level us out. And this time, I go up above the canopy.

Dad has me stop the shuttle and we sit there hovering in midair for several minutes. At least until I stop shaking, dad looks less pale, and we've all gathered ourselves. While the trees wouldn't have hurt the shuttle overmuch, it's still unnerving to fly right at an object. The flying lesson continues for a little while after that, and nothing else goes awry.

As I was sitting here remembering this, I realized something else I did as I got older. Remember I made a joke in the chat about racing tiny ships at unsafe speeds for fun? Why did that come to mind? Because as I got into my 20's on Erra, that's exactly what I did. There was an obstacle course my friends and I set up to fly souped-up shuttles through. Off in some mountain range with a huge canyon of gray granite-like rock.

No wonder I was obsessed with that pod racing game as a kid on Earth. Star Wars Episode I: Racer it was called. We used to rent it from BlockBuster all the time.

I thank you for your time. Adiamas.

​--Kyriel