Every flight starts on the ground, and every flight is supposed to end there. The only question is whether the landing gear makes contact again, or whether we get stuck up there before the final descent.
They say flying is freedom.
A lie.
Flying is always about control.
Up there, the captain is in command, and the aircraft complies. There is no room for uncertainty. No room for weakness. No room for emotion.
Except I'm not a goddamn aircraft. The mirror proves it. Hair all over the place, coffee-proof shadows under my eyes, and that look on my face that makes everyone assume I'm hard. Or pissed off. Usually both.
I don't operate on button inputs. I don't run on SOPs, manuals, or checklists. If I fail to respond the way people expect, there's no procedure to bring me back on heading.
And real life isn't the left seat. Out here, decisiveness, composure, reflexes, and technical skill are not enough.
People are not autopilots. You can't dial in a fixed heading and expect the same response every time.
In real life, you make the inputs. Sometimes nothing happens. Sometimes the whole system blows.
Two people.
One cockpit.
Two control panels flooded with warnings.
Two skies.
The goal is cruise altitude between those two skies. Stability.
Before that comes takeoff. Then turbulence. And at the end, the possibility of a dive.
And both of us were sitting in the cockpit, pretending we had control.
We believed that if we held the sidestick firmly enough, we could ride out the turbulence. We believed the other one would yield. Or at least pull back the thrust a little before everything fractured.
But this was never about that.
One of us always wanted to maintain altitude.
The other just wanted to land the damn thing already.
In flight, altitude makes the people on the ground look small, but it magnifies every decision and every action.
And altitude is the danger you return to, again and again.
For the feeling of climb.
