Persistence – Pays Off!

It seemed like it would never happen. Multiple trips to the local airport, logging what felt like a thousand hours beating around the traffic pattern in the hot, humid weather of South Mississippi. All for an event that would last a mere 30 minutes, yet it would change my perspective on life forever… my first solo flight.

While the dream to fly developed as a child, it didn’t seem like a true possibility for me. It was too cost prohibitive for my family to even consider. As I grew older, the dream waxed and waned a little but still remained. With every airshow I attended, even with every plane I spotted in the sky, there was that ever present feeling that somehow I was going to find a way to fly.

Growing up as a preacher’s son in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, I had the opportunity to meet an interesting mix of people. There were several members of our church that were pilots, some who flew small aircraft and a few that were Hurricane Hunters stationed at Keesler AFB in Biloxi. A few of these pilots even offered me rides, which I jumped at the chance (my mother was less enthusiastic). Looking back on it, I bet my father got tired of pulling the car over so I could jump out and look at the planes flying by.

In college, I had a friend who flew for the State Forestry Commission, keeping a watchful eye in the sky for forest fires. When our schedules agreed, he would take me up for an hour or two, just enough to keep that dream alive. As college graduation drew near, I thought that it would finally happen. Needless to say, life got in the way. I got married and quickly jumped (all in) into the married role. The house, the dog, and the rest of that is history. A few years went by and my (now) ex-wife needed to move home to Southern California. While I couldn’t even begin to get excited about the whole L.A. scene, my father-in-law worked for Lockheed Martin Skunk Works at Plant 42 in Palmdale and provided an outlet for my interests in aviation. He was the program director over the SR-71 Blackbird and also was part of the development team of the F-117 Stealth. This exposure provided even more fuel to the constant burning desire to fly. While in L.A., I worked at a hospital where one of my co-workers’ husband was part of Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites team (check out the link to see some of their cool projects (http://www.scaled.com/projects/index.html). This group has an unbelievable track record at developing high performance experimental aircraft, many of which have been in production for years. They also won the X-Prize

(http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/10/04/spaceshipone.attempt.cnn/index.html).

I spent as much time as I could hanging out at their shop and absorbing as much as I could about aviation. I even had the opportunity to also fly in some rather exotic experimental aircraft over Southern California.

But, as life goes, problems led to a divorce and I found myself heading back home to South Mississippi. Once again, I had to put flying on the back burner. Relocations, growing family, and job changes seemed to be closing the door once again on me being able to fly. Yet, as Jimmy Buffett’s song states, ‘Someday I Will’. That ‘someday’ for me occurred on November 7, 2006.

My training started in the middle of summer in South Mississippi. Besides it being extremely hot and humid, the frequency of thunderstorms made scheduling my flight lessons sort of a cat and mouse game with the weather man. I spent many times with my instructor dodging thunderstorms and heavy rain while trying to figure out exactly why I needed to know how to make the plane quit flying and “stall”. Till this day, that’s a fun part of my training and one that is hard for me to get used to. Nonetheless, Four months after I started training, while the sun was setting on the Gulf of Mexico, a Cessna 172 (12KB ‘one two kilo bravo’) carried a man in his middle 30′s around the traffic pattern on what is the beginning of my journey of a lifetime. After so many years, I can honestly say that things truly happen for a reason. And while I’ll never fully understand that process, I’m glad that it finally came together for me one fall evening in the skies over South Mississippi.