Mayday, Mayday

I flew an airplane today. It was really cool. My brother-in-law is a pilot, and owns a flying service, and my sister just quit her job to go to work for him. I stayed at their house last night and went out to the airport to hang out for a while after I did some Christmas shopping earlier in the day. I only anticipated staying there for about an hour or so, but then we had the following exchange:

Him: "Do you want to go flying today?"
Me: "Of course I do."
Him: "Ok, you'll just have to wait until this plane comes back and I'll have one of my instructors take you up."
Me: "Ok, as long as you're sure."
Him: "It'll be fine."

So I hung around for about another hour, then he had one of his guys take me up. He walked me through the pre-flight check list and kind of showed me how stuff works (meaning I watched while he did everything). Then it was time to get in the plane. He started it up and explained to me how it was going to work, then we took off and I got to fly all around the valley. There's really not a whole lot to it, I think a three year old could manage it once the plane is in the air, but it was an amazing feeling looking down at the valley and all the little buildings and cars.

The pilot who had just returned with the plane was complaining about the autopilot not working properly, so he showed me how that worked and how to make the plane follow the GPS unit. Really cool stuff. We stayed in the air for about 45 minutes (15 minutes longer than the standard intro flight because my brother-in-law is cool like that) and then he walked me through the landing. It's surprisingly not that scary when you know there is someone else who can take over the controls at any moment (and he did).

It was a beautiful day. Apparently one of the few where there wasn't any inversion here in the valley so we could actually see for quite some distance. I'm totally hooked, now I want to get my pilot's license. There's just that little matter of coming up with the $6000 to do so.