The part of flying that is romantic, I think, the part that makes all these people keep doing it, it not the part that is accessible to certain pilots – those flying supersonic jets, bush planes, rescue helicopters, or what have you – and not to others. It is the part that is accessible to all pilots: the chain of intermittent moments, the proverbial hours of boredom and the instants of terror or delight, which are imbued by their very monotony with a continuity and a wholeness that produces, eventually, the same love and yearning as one feels for a companion of many years. Only to be around airplanes, to fly them, is in itself a small but satisfactory romance. The romance is not in the planes, but in the pilots, like that romance of the road that absorbs truckers.
It can be quite boring to outsiders, this uncontrollable interest in airplanes, weather, geography, the sky, air crashes, airports; they are puzzled that, were it even in the middle of the Miss Nude America judging, the pilot would keep glancing upward, by an automatic and unconscious nervous reaction, when the drone of an airplane engine was heard overhead. Nor does the pilot himself know what he hopes to see in the passing airplane. He sees it without seeing it, as people see the time without seeing it who glance at their watches and have to glance again if you ask them, a second later, what time it is. Or as people glance at the reflection in a window; and indeed, as in the passing window, I think that what the pilot sees in the passing airplane is himself. For him all longings for escape, for mystery, for excitement and passion, for change, for youth or immortality, for disappearance, for power or for salvation, are bound up, however vainly, in that little dot that recedes obliquely in an azure sky.