What hobbies have been passed down from your family?

     As my airplane turned toward the runway only five hundred feet below me and a mile in front of me, 10,000 feet of illuminated asphalt stared straight back at me from the surrounding black abyss. All I had to do was land my tiny plane straight down the middle, with 10 knots of wind doing their hardest to push me off to the left. Who lets their son fly across the state in the middle of the night to land an airplane? This was my dream come true.

    My love of flight came from family— my grandfather was a pilot in the Air Force during the Vietnam war and his father was an aerospace engineer during World War Two, and then obtained his license in the 60s. I hold on to the records of his work, including his logbook and the scraps of a crashed Japanese Zero he had helped analyze during the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. My family has been connected to aviation long before me. When my parents found a local flight school, I was elated to have the opportunity to earn my private pilot’s license and to become another generation carrying on my family’s legacy.

    As it turns out, it’s pretty difficult to learn how to fly an airplane. A pilot is required to know how to execute a variety of airborne maneuvers, but I struggled the most with landings. My instructor has a saying that “A good landing is one you can walk away from, but a great landing is one you can fly the plane again after.” An airplane comes with a set of procedures designed to standardize the process at which one loses altitude and prepares the aircraft to land but in reality, no two landings are ever the same. The phrase “flying by the seat of your pants” is a pretty apt description of the experience; a pilot has to continuously be aware of and adjust for any changes in wind, updrafts or downdrafts, turbulence bumping the plane around, and of course, prior human error. 

    The root of my problems with landing stemmed from the method I was using to land; I tried to exactly replicate my instructor’s form every single landing attempt. While this worked some of the time, my instructor still needed to step in to help during others.  When my instructor realized that I was being timid with the controls, he asked me “How much rudder, aileron, and elevator are you supposed to use on landing?” As I struggled for an answer, he told me it required “Whatever it takes.” My understanding of the importance of this statement wasn’t immediate, but from then on I began to realize that I couldn’t fly exactly the same as my instructor because I wasn’t him. Instead, I had to fly the airplane for myself, using whatever means necessary to execute the landing my way.

    My great grandfather’s logbook has an entry that reads “Botched the takeoff today; really goofed!” and nearly 60 years later, I can relate. Though he was flying a completely different plane than I with much looser rules, we are still connected through common experiences and flight. And though I am only another link in the chain of aviators in my family, I have been able to find the distinguishing factors that make me a pilot. By learning to forge my own path through  trial and error, I have been able to reconnect with and understand my family’s shared history.

-William King

(p.s. this essay is only 580 words, so if there's anywhere I can elaborate more, let me know)