It’s the air up there

On a clear day, step outside and look up. The sky is dotted with them. Little airplanes, with legions of private pilots who can tell you -- and boy, do they ever -- what great fun they have lording it over us. Fun? Why, that’s only part of it. Freedom too. Listen to them: It’s no coincidence, they observe, that when people get all misty-eyed about freedom they look heavenward.

A hundred years after Wilbur and Orville, practically anybody can fly, and 600,000 or so do.

But let’s say that you’re not one of them.

Let’s say that you do not share the breathless wanderlust of the single-engine pilots, with their haughty ideas about rising above the crowd, their techno-jargon about harnessing nature to overpower it, their brotherhood of “The High and the Mighty,” as the writer Ernest K. Gann put it.

Let’s say, instead, that you’re one of those earthbound lugheads who thinks that we all hurry around too much as it is. What’s wrong with your feet? Or a bicycle, if you can. A car when necessary. Or trusting yourself to professionals in a jetliner if you’re on the expense account.

Let’s say that when you hear the name Piper you recall that time, on assignment, when you ran out of gas in one above the Arctic Circle a few winters back and wondered how it might turn out when your pilot had to, ah, set down on the frozen-over Yukon River. Let’s say that you recall the tiny back seat of test pilot Dick Rutan’s aerobatic buzz bomb, when you would have traded your line of credit for half his daring, if only you could hold down your lunch.

Let’s just say that the whole idea of flying for pleasure makes you nervous, which is to say dubious.

An invitation arrives: “Be a Pilot.” Never mind all those planes in the sky. There aren’t enough -- at least in the eyes of the pleasure-flying fraternity. After a long slump and the grounding of planes after 9/11, the industry wants to make piloting fashionable again.

So how can you resist?

The view from the left

Before pilots slip these surly bonds -- oh, they are poets, to be sure -- they taxi their airplanes by steering with their feet and throttling with their hand.

Why the contrary approach?

Well, that’s not a question that arises on this day when you are to “Be a Pilot.” Because instructor Dan Maciol has manually pushed this single-engine, fixed-gear Cessna 172 to the middle of the taxiway at Long Beach Airport and explained that you will do the driving.

Heel-toe. Toes engage the brakes. Heels turn the nose wheel. Follow the stripe in the middle of the concrete. Piece of cake. Mostly.

They really will allow practically anybody to do this, so long as you’re 14 years old, can tell red from green and can hear a whispered voice at 3 feet. Somehow it was lodged in your mind that flying began in the classroom. Days of tedium about the lifting properties of airfoils and communications protocols on open radios. In fact, the whole notion of small-craft flying had struck you as a tedious business of dials, levers, switches and rules, enlivened chiefly by moments when you would wish you’d taken up gardening instead.

Now you’re in the left-hand seat.

Maciol, of course, has gone down the checklist. Pilots are slaves to lists. Air in the tires? Check. Gas? Check. Wings attached? Check.

For folks who talk about flying as a quick way to get places, they certainly take their time about it. The stiff, laminated pages of the checklist are as well thumbed as a doorknob.

The Cessna 172 is said to be a roomy airplane. Roomy like a manila file folder, with roughly the same amenities. No cup holder. Check. No ashtray. Check. No stereo. Check. Barely space enough for the pilot’s wristwatch. But at least the machine starts with a key, just like a 1955 Ford pickup. Rattles comfortably like one too.

You follow the stripe. Heel, heel, toe.

No, that stripe.

Oh, OK.

The run-up. Pull that throttle, a lever that looks like the pump on a Coleman stove. Rev the engine, toe the brakes, blow the carbon into the neighbor’s yard, warm up that oil. One more consultation with the checklist.

“OK, now you’re going to take off. I’ll be with you,” says Maciol.

The history of pleasure flying -- a big slice of what is called general aviation -- boils down to this: After World War II, it boomed. A half-million people had been issued leather flight jackets by the military, and many didn’t want to put them in the attic. Through the 1950s and 1960s, growing affluence and technological gains put more and more Americans into the air.

The trend reached its zenith in the 1970s, when young, spirited boomers searched for pathways to get high. Then, in the 1980s, “it was like somebody threw a switch,” said Drew Steketee, president and chief executive of the national “Be a Pilot” campaign. Baby boomers bought homes, settled down, signed up for cable, started families. From a high of 827,000 licensed pilots on Dec. 31, 1980, the numbers tumbled for the next 15 years. Then, of course, 9/11 shut down the skies for weeks.

But lately flying has been on a rebound, Steketee said in a preflight interview. Part of this owes to the fatalistic reappraisal of life that many Americans undertook after September 2001. We don’t live forever; time to live it up. Another reason: Back in 1997, the general aviation community -- airplane manufacturers, pilots’ groups and support businesses -- organized the “Be a Pilot” campaign to dispel public inhibitions and pump up business. Motto: “Stop dreaming, start flying.”

So, provided you’re healthy, you can write a check for $49 at any of 2,114 flight schools across the country and reach for the sky, heel-toe, throttle out, rumble rumble, toes off the brakes, hands on the yoke, follow the runway stripe, steer with your feet, lightly now, 40 knots, thump thump, 50 knots, ease back on the yoke -- gently, no need to squeeze quite that hard on the grip. Aloft.

A pilot’s license requires 40 hours of flying, at least 20 with an instructor. Typically, that takes a few months to a year (accounting for intervals of bad weather). Cost: $5,000 to $6,000, give or take. After that, airplanes can be rented at something between $50 and $100-plus per hour.

Here at Aviation West Flight School in Long Beach, they’ll cut the price to $39 if you’ll downsize to a Cessna 152 and forgo room for a photographer to record your feat. (I went with the roomier model.) Less than the price of an amusement park ticket. No wonder 200,000 bargain hunters have signed up in the last few years to christen their leather bomber jackets.

“You’re doing fine. But you don’t have to hold on quite so hard.” Maciol keeps repeating himself, although you’re not entirely aware yet that you’re gripping the yoke as tightly as a cowboy astride a Brahma bull. As for doing fine, indeed the airplane seems to be pointed in a sensible direction -- up, not down. But you’d be lying if you said that it didn’t seem a little loose in the groove.

Airborne equanimity

Parents, take note. Maciol got the airplane bug as a kid flying a kite. He became single-minded about it. He’s been an instructor for four years, a pilot for nine. He is, of course, of a type -- straight from the Chuck Yeager, yawn, school of cool. You, the fellow with his hands fast on the bull rope, are grateful for that. And he has command of all the dreamy aphorisms that pilots dish out to us lugheads: “When you fly, you can discover the world from new heights.”

It would be more pleasant, however, if the air didn’t seem to vanish from underneath your machine every so often. Bounce, thud, shudder. Air is never quite as reliable as soil. Your teeter-totter recovery from these voids proves, truly, no one else is oversteering this airplane.

Climb west out of Long Beach to the Los Angeles River. Left turn.

To reach 3,500 feet, you set the throttle and fly according to speed. Faster than 80 knots and you are not climbing enough. If it goes under 80, you are too steep.

Wider horizons and a fuller life. That’s one of the cheerfully beckoning adages of Drew Steketee and the “Be a Pilot” promotion. Also: Rise above your earthly problems. Put the world at your feet. Jump over traffic on the freeway.

All true, to a point.

However, there is traffic here too. One may rise above earthly problems, but that doesn’t put an end to them. From a distance, Southern California resembles a beehive of aerial comings and goings. Blimps, biplanes towing banners, 450-ton jetliners, helicopters on patrol, Grandpa sightseeing (does he have his nitro?), the U.S. military, corporate executives Gulfstreaming to Aspen, escaping birthday balloons, stray urban gunfire, migrating waterfowl and who knows how many “be a pilots” are up here with you.

“They say if you can fly in the Basin, you can fly anywhere,” says Maciol.

Flying is safe. Statistics prove it. The bookies in the safety industry figure it this way: Odds of dying in a car accident, 1 in 125. Odds of getting hit by a baseball at a major league game, 1 in 300,000. Odds of dying in an airplane crash, big plane or small, 1 in 4.6 million.

OK, but the “illusions” of flying conjure up dare and lionheart, and always have. Everyone knows the opening of that Army Air Corps song, Off we go into the wild blue yonder.... But don’t forget that other stanza, If you’d live to be a gray-haired wonder / Keep your nose out of the blue!

The grace of the game

No time for such ruminations.

At the end of the Los Angeles River, above the San Pedro-Los Angeles Harbor complex, the government’s aerial zoning board has designated a patch of sky just for the likes of you. There’s another lughead ahead. One more behind, and one far below. Instruction space, a test pattern in the sky, beginner’s alley.

Just above the Queen Mary, Maciol orders another left turn. A two-step process. Rock the airplane first, lifting one wing and another, expanding the line of sight to see if the path is clear. Then a gentle twist on the yoke. Hold your altitude.

“You’re doing fine. See you don’t have to ... “

True enough. There is a certain grace, mechanized but still grace, that comes with sitting at the controls in the left-hand seat of a small airplane, pushing it over onto its shoulder with the lightest touch, carving gentle arcs through the troposphere, riding an unseen cushion of nitrogen and oxygen. Your machine, so thin-skinned and fragile on the ground, conforms nobly to its gaseous surroundings. Cozy. No rattles now, just an om-like intonation from a propeller that has become as invisible as the medium it encounters.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, a pilot from the seat-of-your-pants era and the enduring prose poet of aviation, described it thus: “Once again the pilot in full flight experienced neither giddiness nor any thrill; only the mystery of metal turned to living flesh.”

Up here your position is not haughty after all, but it is powerful -- even in this beginner’s airplane. Boundaries vanish. Vistas grow. At a distance of three-fifths of a mile, the city relinquishes its swelter, grime and chaos but not its bold geometry. The ocean gleams like polished glass. No wonder that Southern Californians, with their expansive regard for space, have made this America’s capital of aviation.

A voice on the radio directs the return leg -- cross over the airport perpendicularly, no lower than 2,000 feet. Make it 2,100 to be safe, Maciol advises. Then rock the wings and scan the neighborhood for a looping right-hander. Another rock of the wings and a descending U-turn. Ahead: the chalk line of the runway, foreshortened in this angled perspective. Clear for landing. It’s time for Maciol to take the yoke ... right?

“No, you’re doing fine.”

Sure, of course. Just keep a light touch on that bull rope. Down. Maciol eases in the throttle. You push gently inward on the yoke. Sway. Compensate. Close now. The chalk line is broadening rapidly; you see nothing else.

Thump.

Toes on the brakes. Rattle zig, rattle zag, slow, left turn, stop.

Before you left the ground, Maciol said that his goal in taking people aloft “is to see a huge smile on their faces -- that is what I want.”

OK, how can you resist?