090

By J. Enriquez

(Unmodified 10/2006 Edition)

When I was a little kid, I had a hard time understanding why people from out of town couldn’t hear the TV . Our extended family got together more often back then, and we would come to Grandma’s house in Schiller Park. This was during the Simpsons’ heyday; my brother and cousins and I would sit to watch, while the typical dialogue would go something like “Homer, could you do me a favor and kill some people on the way out? It would really – GSHOOOOOOOOOOOOOM.” At that point, we’d be laughing at the joke while our friends would be looking up and moving their heads around, wondering what they missed. Being born and raised so close to O’Hare International, the sounds of massive jets cruising in and out over one hundred times each hour were just naturally filtered out by our Chicago ears like a dog whistle, or magic.

At night in the city, when so many blinking lights fill the sky, it’s hard sometimes to tell the planes from the stars. My family and I moved away from Chicago when I was eight, so most of my time there as a kid was spent in the yard, the backseat, or the playground. I would think about what it would be like to be in the blinking light one night –  a plane thirty thousand feet above – looking  out the wide windows of a  humming cockpit full of switches and radios and lights, on the way to California, Alaska, London, or Tokyo, while flight attendants brought pillows and drinks around the peaceful cabin.

I wanted to be up there all the more after we moved away. I went to high school in a small, rural town way up north in Illinois that, like most of the state at the time, was composed entirely of corn and teenage ennui. At first, like most kids, of course,I went through a lot of other career aspirations: psychologist, programmer, virologist, humor columnist, et cetera. While my future title was important to me (I’m a very superficial and arrogant man), it was what that job title would mean day to day that mattered most. I was resolved not to rot away in an office or a cubicle, waking up to the same drudgery at every morning, trudging through a commute with some cheesy and awful bumper sticker about a love of coffee only to push pencils or computer keys until I finished my life of quiet desperation with a wistful sigh and a determined swerving of the minivan steering wheel towards the tree, the big one that was sure to hold fast and end things quickly . No, Teenager Me was sure, he would not be part of your system. There was still something calling me from the sparse blinking little lights in the sky.

I told my dad one time in our driveway, looking up at a distant streak of red and green through the brisk country air and wispy clouds. “That’ll be me up there someday.” He said, “Have you considered medical school?” My dad is afraid of heights .

Science has advanced so far that when someone reaches 10th grade, experts and computers somewhere in the upper echelons of the Illinois education cadre have already decided what they should be when they grow up. Like the Guardian Class in Plato’s Republic – creepy old men, they are. Their final analysis was in something called the Illinois “PLAN” test, sort of a pre-ACT, given me when I was 15 or so. The front page of the PLAN results predicted that I would score a 30 on the ACT while the back page showed me, with the aid of an offensive bullseye-like diagram, that I should pursue one of exactly three futures: writer, actor, or doctor. I thanked the PLAN for its insight, stuffed it somewhere between my poker set and dirty pictures, and went back to my 10th grade pursuits of playing poker with my friends and looking on the internet for dirty pictures.

The front page turned out to be an incorrectly low estimate as I actually took the ACT test, pulled down its pants, turned it around, and raped it so hard its buddy SAT could feel it. This gave me the confidence to ignore its back page. I continued to pursue my dream, one of the careers farthest on the very edge of my ideal career bullseye diagram, under the unglamorous heading of Transportation Professions, but magic to me nonetheless: Airline Pilots. Silk scarves flapping in the wind, under leather jackets with big patches and proud epaulets, huge reflective sunglasses burning the patriotic reflections of bald eagles painfully into your retinas like fire – take it, take it, take it all! There’s nothing like that time when you actually believe the lie that “you can be whatever you want to be as long as you put your mind to it.” Ha ha. Preposterous.

When I graduated high school, my grades weren’t that great, seeing as how I’d only spent about half as much time inside the building as I was officially supposed to. I’m sure I had more tardies and absences than any other passing student the whole time I was there. I’d wanted to apply to the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, because they looked really freaking cool, but because it was so far away, and the fact that a house can only be mortgaged for student loans so many times before the bank people start to shake their heads disapprovingly and spit on you, I decided on University of Illinois. I stopped re-reading Ender’s Game long enough to apply and really played it up on the essay how important the dream of flight was not only to me, but to those in the future for whom we were keeping it alive. My parents spent much of the summer in confused anxiety, randomly chasing me around the house with rolling pins for being stupid enough to apply to only one school. The acceptance letter came on a Saturday when I was playing poker with my high school buddies in the living room. “I got into U of I!” I told them elatedly. “I’m gonna fly airplanes!” I gave them all a couple of my chips.

The University of Illinois Institute of Aviation was founded in 1946 to train the next generation of commercial and research pilots. Based at Willard-UIUC Airport in Savoy, just a few miles south of Champaign, the Institute has a fleet of beautiful and impressively-maintained Piper airplanes ordered in the University’s orange and blue colors. Focused on a very rigid and determined progression of flight and ground school courses, with an emphasis on machine-operator psychology, the Institute awards Bachelor’s Degrees and Master’s Degrees in Aviation Human Factors and, having been the first flight school in the country approved by the FAA to conduct all tests that award Pilot Certificates, it is considered to crank out top-notch aviators.

I got my first look at the planes the same day I got my first look at the University, when my family and I drove down for a Student Tour in the summer of 04. We were given a time to break away from the rest of the tour groups and come down to the airport for their own program. Myself and this All-American looking blonde kid, about ten inches taller, were the only ones there that day. We took a quick walk around the Institute building, full of old pilot movie posters and cubicles adorned by model planes, weather maps, binders with airplane-brand decals, printed airspace bulletins, and diagrams. Yeah, I thought, a 17-year-old who had seen all of these things only in movies, this is the place. Then we were led out the screen door and out onto the “Line” where the fleet sat at attention in long rows, alongside the runways and control tower, their white and orange paint gleaming brightly in the afternoon sun, propellers all resting ready in the same vertical position.

“You want to sit inside and get a feel for it?” asked the instructor, after he popped open the door on a proud little 4-seat PA-28 Archer. Do I? Sure thing, Cap. I step on the black part here? Okay, I’ll be careful not to use the flaps as a step. I just push the seat back? It’s cool? Yeah, let’s see what this feels like. Yeah. Can I hold the yoke? You’re goddamn right I’ll be your guest. Hello, little orange plane. I want you to be my girlfriend.

All-American Kid didn’t bother to give the cockpit a look. He’d already been flying for the Guard for a few years, his mom told us. He had plenty of flight hours to transfer by now. This was nothing new to him. It did look like there were a lot of dials and readouts at the time;  maybe it was a little complicated. But my friend Kyle and I had led a squadron of X-Wing Starfighters on the infamous mission that destroyed the Imperial Death Star back in Junior High. The controls for that game had been pretty in-depth, you know. How hard could this be?

At Orientation, again, Aviation students were given a special time to break away from the rest of the crowd and take the Air Bus to Willard. We’d spent an earlier period in a classroom, filling out flight period times and organizing our schedules, full of the classes we would like to take and when – all a mean-spirited practical joke, of course, for we were incoming Freshmen, and as such would get none of the classes or class times that we wanted, but rather only their exact opposites if we managed to register for any classes at all, regardless of whether they were open or not – rules are rules. There, I’d gotten a look at the rest of my incoming contemporaries. They were mostly tall (or at least taller than me, which might very well be average), thin, and dressed in athletic Illini gear and backwards baseball caps, in groups discussing frat party business. There was one awkward-looking larger kid near the back with longer hair and a dopey look who made me more confident in myself.

Now we were in groups inside the Brian Room, a big, featureless, multi-purpose area of the Institute Building, playing a game where we were supposed to identify the airplane that was shown on the screen. The very last one, some kind of orange biplane, was apparently difficult, since every answer was wrong as each group read off their verdict. Finally, the table right next to mine gave their final answer as “Orange biplane.” No one could argue with that. When at last we went to the computer lab to log in and officially register for our classes, our class of Aviation hopefuls had its first failure. “Enter your University IDs,” the director told us, “and then, if you’ll remember the paper in an envelope that I gave you yesterday with your password, and told you to take care of and not to lose, enter that below.” The dopey-looking kid raised his hand and the director turned to him. “Yes?” she asked. He said, “I lost my password.” Thereupon followed the most perfect moment of hilarious silence. Shaking her head in utter disappointment with his life, she dismissed him. “Just go sit in the Brian Room.”

Years into the program, whenever I told someone I was a student pilot, they would ask “Do you actually go up in the planes yet?” The thing is, we go up in the planes on day one. Well, day two, since the first one is just for paperwork, but nevertheless. We do not spend preparatory months or years in simulators or practice rooms before actually flying – we show up, hapless little Freshmen, get headsets strapped to our heads, tied down into our seats, and take off right away. My first flight partner, Colby, and I flipped a coin to see who would be at the helm with our first flight instructor, Brian, that very first day. He won which means they two sat at the front and I sat in the backseat of the little Illini light plane. I put on the seatbelt and watched the pavement outside swivel a bit from side to side before it slid away underneath and gave way to rocky blue skies. It was my first time ever flying in an airplane.

We flew nice and easy for a few minutes while we left the airport, before Brian turned with a grin and asked for the first time a question we would hear a lot: “Want to see something cool?” Tell me something. What would you say? “Okay, first, look out the side window,” he told us. “Watch the wing. I’m gonna make it look like it’s sticking up straight 90 degrees!” With that, the seats fell from beneath us and we were held against the seatbelts while the world outside the window swung around like a compass spun too fast. I was glad I cared nothing for my health or wellbeing and laughed in the face of medical experts who advocated eating a breakfast. “Now watch this pen,” said Brian, and we watched him hold one up in the center of the cabin.  “I’m gonna make it float in place!” he told us, releasing it and pushing full forward on the control yoke, sending our plane into a death plummet. “See it?” asked Brian. “It’s floating!” True to his word, as the airplane dove to earth like a mad bomber, the Bic inside was flying. I saw it myself, when I fearfully opened an eye and aimed it up from my head’s position between my legs. “Ha ha,” said Brian, and Colby asked for the paper bag just exactly in time. “Good man,” commended Brian.

I met Aldo in the Ground School for Aviation 101 – the class where we sat in a lecture with tons of other aspiring pilots, mostly in dickhead clothes and backwards baseball caps, and listened to an instructor instead of going up in the aeroplane and making pens float. We both sat in the back row of the room, next to the old man who came to class every day even though he didn’t go here, and we could never figure out why. We were both Freshmen, newly minted independent, and therefore hungry. I actually cut myself rather badly the first time I tried to use a can opener, but it should be noted that this can opener was of very poor quality. Ground School was held in the Engineering Hall, and its doors, along with the doors of the buildings beside it, always had fliers advertising meetings for clubs that we did not belong to, but were offering free pizza for attendance, and it was usually Papa John’s.

Together then, after every Ground School, Aldo and I would pose as members of computer programming clubs, mechanical engineering clubs, engineering advocacy clubs, et cetera, sitting through their boring presentations and business before making away with entire extra pizzas, because attendance was always low and always overestimated. We did once abandon a pizza after sitting in a room awkwardly for a few minutes with a group we had never heard of called the SBE. “Oh, I think I just figured it out,” he told me. “Man, I think we should go.” “Why?” I asked. “Because this is the Society of Black Engineers.” We were, in fact, the only people there who were not black. I thought about that for a second. I said, “I don’t think they’d discriminate against us for that.” “We’re also not engineers.”

As our first year in Aviation progressed, Aldo and I tried to figure out the logistics together. Normally, a student would go from AVI 101 to 120, and then have earned his private pilot’s license. After that came 130 and 140, which earned him a CFI rating, or certification to fly in Instrument conditions, when visibility was not there. After that came advanced courses to earn Instructor ratings, Complex Aircraft ratings, a Commercial license, and so on. If the student did not pass the “check ride” at the end of a course, or did not complete other requirements of the course, he had to redo the whole semester in a remedial repetition of it, called a 090 course. “What do you have to do there?” I joked with Aldo. “Learn how to taxi again?” “Yeah, if you’re too bad to fly,” he laughed. “They send you to Taxiing School.” “Ha ha… 090…”

I learned from him a little while later that the dopey kid had gone home. Aldo had overheard him say to the director something about “A few problems…” Days later, he was out. Sometimes Aldo and I still talk wistfully about the dopey kid. It’s a wonder, however, the same thing did not happen to my flying career then.

To say that I did badly at flying my first semester would be an understatement unworthy of my failure. In fact, I have thankfully repressed so many memories of my inadequacy as a defense mechanism for my ego that anything I can tell you of it is insufficient. Perhaps the best way to express it is this: A few semesters after I had him, Aldo had Brian as his flight instructor. In his introduction to the course, Brian used as a warning example an unnamed former student who missed too much class, performed many maneuvers incorrectly or not at all, and was unsafe in practice throughout most of the course requirements. Aldo told me about this when I found out he was now learning under my former instructor and after a minute of my sad glare, he came to the realization: “Oh my god, that was you?” After which, of course, for several minutes on end, he could not contain his laughter.

I have a few favorite Brian stories, but I’d have to say my favorite is when I went out to the backyard of the house I lived in at the time with a bottle of vodka and woke up in the river that ran through it and had to cancel my flight lesson for the following day because I couldn’t find my keys. That story isn’t directly related to him except that he and Aldo shared a laugh over it months later, when Aldo told him that’s what had happened. “He lost his keys in the river? Ha ha ha!” they would laugh together, “What, did he party a lot or something?” I did, in fact, not.

It should be made clear that Brian, like all flight instructors at U of I, was an impressive pilot and a skilled, patient teacher. He cut me a lot more slack than he had to and he was a really cool guy in general, not to mention his prowess at the plane. In fact, the impressive skill and patience of U of I’s flight instructors is what makes them so goddamn frustrating. I remember an occasion, for example, where I was having a lot of trouble landing in a mild to moderate crosswind. This prompted my instructor to show me how it was done by requesting a landing on the runway with the highest, most turbulent crosswind possible, one that would not even be in use for that very reason, and execute a textbook touchdown so perfect that I think the tire streaks spelled out his name. Or when I did not drop enough altitude in time and was caught above a cloud (which you are not supposed to go through), so that my instructor would take the controls, point at a tiny gap in the clouds, predict exactly where it would go, what size it would become, pull up on the flaps, giddily make a cartoon-car-brakes sound effect, and drop us through it like a beer pong ball bouncing into its cup. This was all terrible for my ego.

Brian never berated me for my mistakes, never yelled or belittled me. He would wait until we were debriefing on the ground in his office to go over what I did wrong. “You were about ten feet from hitting those power lines,” he would say, “and frying us like an omelet.” Or, “On that aborted landing, you dropped the flaps before increasing power, a horrible life-threatening error that we’ve trained you from day one not to commit.” Yes, those things did actually happen, and yes, Brian was much nicer in telling me about them, but you get the idea.

I didn’t understand it. Since I was a kid in school, I had been focused on flying. I had the A-2 bomber jacket, the Randolph sunglasses, the Sporty’s flight bag and Smith & Wesson flashlight. My login names for AOL Instant Messenger and my email addresses all had “Aviator” in them. I had a subscription to Flying Magazine since high school and I’d rented all of the pilot movies at least twice. Yet, still it came. Brian sat down with me at the end of the fall and said, “Listen, I don’t want you to hate me, but…” Had I bought the wrong kind of sunglasses?

Aldo and I both went to Taxiing School at the end of that first semester. We were 090s. We were sure it was going to be just fine. Before Christmas vacation, Aldo and I found out what it would be like to fly drunk. We loaded a flight simulator on the computer, had some beer, and shot down Nazi bastards over the cold Atlantic. “It’s just one semester,” we said. “Soon, we’ll be right back on track with flying... Watch out for that- yeah, kill him, kill him, burn, you son of a bitch, burn.”

Spring of 05 was my first 090 semester. My instructor was a guy named Jason, just as skilled and patient as any other. It was with him that I finally soloed a plane, which means I got to fly it all by myself. On April 9th, 2005, the weather was warm, the skies were clear, and the winds were light. I walked out to the line by myself, performed the pre-flight (checking for faulty joints, full fuel tanks, any missing wings, etc.), and went up into the rectangular “pattern” around the airport. It was just hot enough so that it feels nice, as if you were wearing a sweater, and there was a breeze like a palm branch swaying on an island shore. I went around the pattern only five or six times, doing “touch-and-goes,” quick landings for practice, and parked the airplane in its place without a mishap. I always drove to the airport, since I lived out of the way of the Air Bus, and every Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday, motorists could tell how well I did at flying that day by the erratic and dangerous style of control I happened to have. That was a windows-down, radio-loud, to-hell-with-the-pedestrians kind of day. Nevertheless, when I went home at the end of my first year of college, I was a 090 yet again – I had not completed the course requirements satisfactorily yet. It was a bit pensively I sat in my instructor’s office for the second time at the end of the semester, by which time the airport was almost empty and fairly laid-back, to listen to the “not making it” talk, left my logbook in the rack, and drove home for the summer.

It is the opinion of the Institute of Aviation that if a student goes 090, and as such does still not complete the course, he should just go away. After a failed 090, the student is forced to “take a semester off” from flying, to reconsider whether he should care about flying at all. I was determined to come back, to earn my license, to show them all.

That first year, Aldo and I attended an informational meeting hosted by the group Women In Aviation, with two special guests: one an airline pilot, and one a corporate pilot, who would impart to us the secrets to success in the aviation world. At first, the meeting was pretty disappointing. Not only was Women In Aviation, not being an Engineering group and therefore not having all of the University’s funding and inflamed lust, not well-off enough to offer us free Papa John’s pizza, but the refreshments we actually paid for turned out to be a table full of store-bought bread, sliced ham, and cheese with which we were allowed to make our own sad little sandwiches. The mayo ran out early. The actual information though, I would rather discover was very useful to me, if not anyone else. “I worked very hard to get my job,” told us the airline pilot, “I had to really put forth an effort into working wherever I could at first, getting enough hours and certificates to be respected, wrestling my way up the regional airline ladder until I finally earned, bit-by-bit, my promotions to where I am now.” We applauded him. “Um, I just kind of got my job a little while after college,” said the corporate pilot. “One of my friends told me his friends at the company were hiring; he gave me the number so I faxed in a resume, and a few days later, I was hired. It just kind of happened. I fell ass-backwards into this great career.” We applauded him. The most important part, however, was when they told us what it was like to be a pilot. “You have to be like everybody else,” they both agreed. “Companies and passengers don’t want a pilot who’s going to look different, who’s going to talk different, who’s going to act different. This is not a job where you are trying to express yourself. You need to put on your uniform, become exactly like all of the other professionals, and do your job exactly as you are told, every trip.”

Over the summer, I saw my old friends from high school. “I switched majors,” I told Kyle on the phone when I got back. “To what?” he asked. “English,” I replied. “No,” he said, “that already was your major. You must be a little confused.” “What? No, it wasn’t.” “Of course it was,” he told me. “You’re an English major. That’s what you are.” “I think I know what my academic concentration was!” I insisted. He repeated helpfully, “You must be a little confused.”

In high school, my friends and I would hang out at my house on a lot of the weekends to watch unremarkable rented movies that happened to be awesome. One of the best such movies was The Right Stuff, the film about the amazing pilots who went on to be the United States’ first Apollo astronauts after grueling training and demonstration of skill. Like with all ensemble cast movies, we were each given an on-screen alter avatar against our will, whose actions on-screen would reflect on us, whatever they might be. As it turns out, every single one of us is studying now to be some kind of teacher or engineer. And yet, every time a little farm field biplane or towering jetliner stream by overhead, I still wanted to hold that yoke.

The spring of 06 came and I was ready to give flying my best shot. I was getting up early in the morning to go jogging. I was eating my fruits and vegetables. I was there for all my classes, every class. I was staying up late, demanding that my girlfriend quiz me on the phone with V-speeds, radio frequencies, airport locations, for hours on end every night (We’re just friends now…). I was reading my AOPA Flight Training Magazine like it was the Bible with slow-motion gunfights. I was driving out to my flight lessons early, talking planes with my latest 090 instructor – a really cool guy named Roy who can’t have been much older than I was, but was talented enough I would have loved to see him in a head-to-head with Brian, if he had not by now moved to Boston to join his beloved Red Sox. I was ready to go, even when thunderstorms were crashing down on the airport, even when there was fog so thick I ran through a subdivision cul-de-sac or two on my way there, even when the wind had blown most of the planes away into the corn fields and the mechanics were reaping their way through the tornado to get them. I was playing classic rock and doing sit-ups, baby. This was going to be my time.

Finally, we landed after our final day of practice, the warmth of the coming summer and the end of the semester upon us. “Listen,” said Roy, “This just isn’t working out…”

Aldo, now like me another 090 who did not pass his check ride yet again, told me it would be great to write a story about really putting your heart into following your dream, giving it your best, and failing. I also thought this would be great. At least I got on the Dean’s List that last semester. I did pretty much everything well. I simply could not fly. There’s something very important in all of this.

There is one important question I heard every time I finished a course with one of my instructors. The question was, “Why do you want to fly?” At the end of Roy’s course, sitting in his cubicle, I heard another instructor ask this to his failed student in a very mean-spirited way, as in “Why are you even flying anymore? You should just quit.” None of my instructors ever did that to me. Rather, they were genuinely interested in my motivation and how to help me succeed. Of course, at first, apparently due to my sheer incompetence, I had to convince them that flying was not something that my parents were pushing me into against my will (my dad actually wishes I wouldn’t do something like fly airplanes, because apparently it is risky). It’s an important question. I think it might be tied to the key. “Why do you want to fly?”

The answer, which is hard to keep in mind when you’re struggling to balance crosswind correction with descent rate with indicated airspeed and not dropping your notebook while you’re coming in to land on a thin runway at the relatively sluggish speed of 70 miles per hour, is the lights in the night sky. Yes, I want to be able ten or twenty years from now to pack up the family for vacation, get into a little plane, and fly out to some gorgeous mountain valley or lake that no one else can get to, to relax in and take in all by ourselves. Yes, the coolness factor of a pilot’s license is alluring, especially when coupled with the motorcycle I’m saving up for (which will hopefully really spice up my obituary). And yes, there is little practical gain in pursuing this whole thing more since it is no longer a career aspiration that I will profit by. But it’s the blinking little lights at night, gliding slowly between the stars, to whom the lights below must look like magic – it’s they that make me want to be up there. That’s the answer. For now, I’m content here on the ground, on yet another “semester off” from aviation. But the next flight sign up day is coming soon. And what’s another three or four thousand dollars in student loans when I’m already up to my head in them anyway? There are more than enough little lights waiting.

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