Two things here, in order of importance:

1. Robert G. is a person awesome past words. Kinda like Darla G. Well, when I say ‘kinda,’ I mean ‘exactly.’

2. I did my first stall today, under Robert G’s perfect tutelage.

‘Stall’ is flying jargon for what happens when the plane’s wings stop generating lift. Stalling on purpose is a great training maneuver for tons of reasons, while an unintentional stall is a sign of either a poor pilot or equipment failure (really bad situation: both). So, when the wings stop generating lift, the magic of flying goes away really quickly, but not as quickly as the altitude needle spins around on its dial.

The wings stop generating lift when you don’t have enough airspeed, so to do a training stall you bring the 2000lb plane to a complete stop. Zero airspeed. How do you bring an airplane to a complete and perfect stop in the middle of the air? You pull up..the plane starts to climb, and you pull up a lot more, and next thing you know the plane is pointed straight up and right around when you realize you’re pointed straight up, the plane has run out of speed.

We stopped. In the air. Three thousand five hundred feet in the air. Over the Bering Sea. DEAD STILL..for a moment. This dead stillness lasts for an incredibly short moment*. Then that moment was gone, the plane wheeled over through the sky, the sky and the ocean have switched places and now we’re falling straight down out of the sky at 100mph. Spinning, too. No bad words nor good words nor any words passed though my head, as it was too full of mindblowing dumbfounding stupefying terrifying…umm..well, all those words added up then doubled up, that’s just about right.

Robert had told me to step on the rudder away from the spin direction to straighten the plane, so I mashed the rudder pedal, and we stopped spinning. Although there’s still the falling straight down thing going on, and we’re up to 150mph.

‘So, Dave, now what you do, sometime soon here you’ll want to pull up  a bit, get ‘er back to level’ says Robert.

I pulled up a little bit, and Robert repeated himself with the addition of the word ‘more.’ I pull the yoke (airplane steering wheel), the plane levels out, I feel like my body was just squashed then turned upside down and inside out then back outside in then wrung out and plopped back into the seat, and then I realized I was grinning my face off like a one legged man who just won a butt kicking competition.

‘So, Dave, now what you do, is you do that again.’

So I did it again…

*calc buffs, here’s the idea: the moment lasts for about as long as d/dx(x^2) = 0