They say that love will make you do crazy things…
It does.
This past Saturday, I took a 45-minute train ride for love. I walked five miles for love. I stood on the side of the road for eight hours while I picked up one heck of a sunburn despite having slathered on a whole lot of SPF 30—all this… for love.
The love I’m talking about is different from the love I feel for my husband, different from the love I feel for my parents and different from the love I feel for my friends, my pets or any living thing.
I can’t control it and I can’t hide it. Heck… I don’t want to control it OR hide it. I love airplanes.
There, I said it…
I. Love. Airplanes.
I love the smell of jet fuel.
I love the hum of whirring engines and the warmth of the window as sunlight beams through the layers of plexiglass.
I love cruising through smooth air at 35,000 feet and I love hearing the two-tone ding that precedes the captain announcing he’s turning on the seatbelt sign due to anticipated rough air.
I love being pushed back into my seat when we take off and I love the butterflies I get as we near the ground on approach.
I love being in the air most. But when I can’t fly, I do the next best thing… I stand with my eyes to the sky, staring agape at the metal birds that weave through the clouds above.
I am not quite sure what it is that tugs at my heartstrings… the sheer beauty in how these beasts are engineered, the magic of seeing something so gigantic defy gravity as though it’s no big deal, or the way in which a big metal tube can bring people like you and me to places we’ve never been, thousands of miles from where we began.
Airplanes are remarkable.
Flight is magical.
Nothing is impossible.
These are the feelings felt and ideas held by people like the Wright Brothers, Amelia Earheart, William Boeing and more. Think about it… we as “AV geeks” have been roaming this planet for more than a century!
A lot about our world has changed since the airplane and the sky first met… but I truly think that despite our world feeling a lot smaller these days, our hearts can grow a lot bigger if we keep the magic of flight alive.
The Great Planes 