Okay, if we're all going to take turns telling misty stories...
My mother used to put me in my stroller and take me for walks (rolls?) around the block. If I saw a contrail overhead, or heard the hollow-tube rushing sound of a jetliner at altitude, I would smile, point at the sky and try to imitate the sound. (Of course, I don't remember this myself...)
When I was three, I finally asked my father what he did for a living. Just where was he going in his black suit with the gold stripes and all that luggage? He told me he was an airplane pilot. (He was a DC-9 F/O at E.A.L.) That sounded like a pretty good thing to me, so I decided I'd be one too, someday.
My little brother and I used to make cockpits out of Tinkertoys and Lego blocks. It was easier to make a convincing looking throttle quadrant--complete with reverser levers--out of Tinkertoys. Legos were better for fire handles, master caution lights, etc. To make our play more realistic, dad used to give us his old Jepps when he did his revisions.
We also drove our mom nuts making airports with those same Legos. They got pretty intricate, too. Runway lights, VASI, ALSF, REIL's, the beacon, jetways, localizer and glideslope antennas, VOR's, even a four-course range!...all were re-created as best we could with little plastic blocks.
(By the way, get involved when your children decide to play like this. It will mean a lot to them. I remember my dad sitting on the floor with us, scheming a way to make a sort-of working VASI with white and red Lego blocks stacked together!)
I used to drive with my father to MIA when he went to check his mail, turn in bids, etc. I remember the clerks, dispatchers, and crew schedulers, and especially the pilots treating me like I was supposed to be there...even at age six. Most especially--and this is a little weird--I remember the rich leather smell of the flight bag room. To this day, I associate that smell with professional flight operations.
When I was about ten, dad took me--and just me--on a Buffalo NY overnight. Not long after takeoff, Captain Mel Keene had the senior F/A sneak me into the cockpit, and I went almost all the way to Buffalo on the jumpseat. Getting to share a cockpit with my father and his captain on a night flight sealed my fate. I knew that somehow, I was going to be an airline pilot.
And I made it, too, with a lot of twists and turns along the way.
I love every airplane I've ever flown, but to me no aircraft will ever feel quite so...welcoming as those white-and-silver DC-9's with their two-tone blue hockey sticks.
What's wrong with us that a conglomeration of carefully machined aluminum, steel, and plastic, kerosene and rubber, silicon and glass can drive us to such distraction?
...or is it the people we meet along the way?
...or is it just the view from up there...?
