Faking Flight Long Before AI

When I was a kid in New Jersey, I’d climb an old maple tree in the backyard as high as possible to imagine I was flying over the neighbors’ rooftops. From there I could look inside Mrs. Friedler’s windows, but that’s another story. All to say I wanted to be a pilot, but fantasy flight was my only option.

One summer day I rode my bicycle to the top of a nearby hill solely to pedal down as fast as possible, simulating what I thought it must be like to push airplane throttles forward and achieving rotation speed, defy gravity. Not a lot of science involved nor preparation for unforeseen consequences, two forces all pilots should consider in order to avoid the ultimate aviation failure—embarrassment. 

As kids, our bikes were more than transportation. They were motorcycles, horses, and to me, airplanes. I’d ride with my arms spread wide, miming flight and oblivious to what strangers thought of this weird kid channeling Icarus. I yearned to fly too close to the sun, to prove that flight was achievable and not solely by adults who had the money and made all the dumb rules. And I wasn’t alone in aviation fantasy. My friend Jimmy and I would dogfight on bikes like fighter pilots, chasing each other around the A&P parking lot, dodging flak in my SPAD 13 biplane from unimaginative shoppers loading groceries into station wagons the size of boxcars. They were oblivious that we were aerial knights. I imagined myself as American ace Frank Luke, the James Dean of 1918—both were cool with swept-back hair, making them look fast when standing still. Years later I’d write a screenplay treatment about James Dean playing Frank Luke in an aviation Rebel Without a Plot fantasy movie. Hollywood passed. 

Back to that hill with me two-thirds of the way down before realizing I hadn’t thought this through and learning that fun roads don’t run straight forever. Instead, it turned 90 degrees. I squeezed both brake levers only to feel the already worn pads pop free, and trying to make the impossible turn, I exceeded critical angle of reality, smacked the curb and tumbled ass-over-teakettle into Mrs. Friedler’s topiary garden. As I recovered, she hovered over my ego’s twisted wreckage with a look implying she’d never seen a future pilot so pathetic.

Failure in pursuit of flight rarely nobbles dreamers, so I joined a Civil Air Patrol squadron, lured in by recruiting posters implying they had airplanes. They didn’t. But on the hottest day of summer, 1967, I accompanied dozens of other cadets to McGuire AFB for an orientation flight. Preflight briefer Major Overgross said that we’d fly after lunch and “anyone who’s never flown shouldn’t eat too much.” I’d never flown, but that warning vanished into the crevice of my teen brain where adult advice went to die, and I sucked up mess hall macaroni salad with mayo and tiny marshmallows. 

For my indoctrination flight, I had visualized a T-38 two-seater jet with me up front in a flight suit and helmet, spearing cumulus clouds while Bugs Bunny’s Ride of The Valkyries coursed through my inner reality. Instead, we stood beneath the hulking empennage of a C-130 Hercules transport, nothing fighter pilot about it. Still, flight’s flight.

An airman, who must’ve ticked off a superior to glean this babysitting assignment, waved us uniformed cadets up the ramp into the C-130 and said to sit on the web seats running longitudinally through the solar oven. As the ramp closed and temperature rose, the four turboprop engines complained to life, filling the interior with burnt kerosene and sweat. Our taxi route must’ve tangled us in Jersey Turnpike traffic, but eventually we lined up on what I assumed was a runway. Seated below the windows I saw little more than bits of grimy sky. 

Hellish noise shoved us down the runway, wheels smacking expansion joints until we lifted. I was flying at last. The transport bounced through thermals, as I caught glimpses of passing clouds through a window across the fuselage. Finally, we leveled, and the airman indicted we could stand. So, I stood while twisting to look outside as the airplane banked, and the gyros inside my head tumbled.

I slumped to the seat and stared at the floor, willing it would quit spinning, when the airman’s shoes appeared in front of mine, and he shouted, “You gettin’ airsick?” I’d never heard that term. How could anyone be sick of air? Of flight? Of the softly caressing, touch-the-face-of-grace above the planet? My reply was a retched denial punctuated with macaroni salad, mayo, and tiny marshmallows atop those shoes.

I never looked out the window on my first flight, and the Air Force didn’t invite me back. Years later, on a warm day in Iowa, I rode my e-bike to the airport and stopped in the grass beside my hangar. I no longer climb trees or ride with arms outstretched, but my mind is still that of an airport kid, already inside my Citabria, where I’d be Frank Luke, again, dogfighting with imaginary Fokkers, when I swung my leg over the bike seat, caught the baggage rack and tumbled chagrin-over-teakettle in view of my hangar neighbor who gazed as Mrs. Friedler might have at a pathetic old pilot who will never grew up.