A Recap of Moments Flying that Made the World Below Look Different 🗽
The biggest perspective shift I've experienced
Hi friends, it’s been a little while.
Six months ago, I started writing an article about the cool world of flying. Well, I never really finished it because the more I flew, the more I realized there were more cool things to learn about, and an article could never encompass it all.
Here I am, half a year later as a licensed pilot, with some moments that shifted how I see the beautiful place we live in.
There are patches of green and brown everywhere…
On the ground, I’ve always felt like the places I live, study, and spend time in are so visibly unique from any other place. Like I surely could recognize my hometown from the sky, right? Wrong.
More often than I’d like to admit, I’ve flown over places I knew and have not been able to recognize them. Spotting landmarks and finding runways within these patches became a skill that required a lot of practice to develop.
Somewhere above an overcast layer are clear skies…
I had a lot of misunderstandings about clouds before this whole flying thing. Turns out, clouds aren’t just blobs that were formed millions of years ago that float around to form the formations we see today.
Neither does an overcast layer mean that the entire atmosphere is a cloud. Even when you look up and there’s absolutely no blue peeking through, sometimes by just flying up a few hundred feet, you’ll pass through the entire cloud layer, and the sky becomes clear again.
It’s just so cool to know that above the gloominess of overcast skies, there are always clear skies.
Fireworks are basically little candles…
Once you see this, you can’t unsee it. In my memory, fireworks used to be these gigantic explosions in the sky that had to go up very far for everyone to see them.
But, on a flight at 3000 ft, which isn’t even that high, we looked down (not up) and saw fireworks. They looked like tiny candles with flames that illuminated small portions of the space that surrounded them. Attending a baseball game a week later, I saw fireworks while sitting inside a stadium, and they looked so much closer to the ground than they did in my memory previously.
Try flying to another state for lunch…
Something I’m so, so, so grateful for because of flying is how it makes geographical distance seem much less limiting. Living in the center of North Carolina, I would have never imagined casually traveling to Virginia to get lunch, but that’s exactly what I did the day after my checkride.
The entirety of New York City just off your wing tip…
I combined two of my required long flights together to get an excuse to travel to New York City, and it was totally worth it.
This really messes with my brain to think about. Within just a short 10-minute flight at 1000 ft, we were able to overlook such a huge city and see the entirety of the geographical area where over 8 million people live.
“Can you believe they just let random pilots like us fly so close to these buildings?” We got so close to the Manhattan skyline that it almost felt illegal.
Getting to do something very few people have ever seen…
A moment so special and so personal at the same time. My instructor and I made it on the list of the very few people who have ever landed on RDU’s Runway 14.
The runway is short and to approach it, you have to first fly over two runways in the perpendicular direction. Then after you land, you have to make a U-turn on the runway to taxi to parking.
RDU is not just the airport I train out of, but also my home airport—the same airport I’ve been flying in and out of from a very young age. So getting to land on all the runways there…feels extremely lucky.
so cool so girlboss 😎
woahhh how did i miss this