When you get an invitation to go up in a prop plane, you take it.

I recently finished writing a novel manuscript that involves a character making an emergency landing in a small plane. And that’s all I’m going to tell you about it for now—sign up for my newsletter in the sidebar if you want to hear more in the future!

Thanks to the flight elements in my novel, I watched a lot of Youtube and read a lot of content on how to fly a plane.

Turns out, all those buttons and the names of various parts of airplanes are kind of hard to get a handle on when you’re just piddling around online.

So, I wrote the scenes as well as I could and then reached out to John Correia, one of my professors from college who also happens to have his pilot’s license, to see if he’d look it over and make sure I had it right.

Sure, he said. I could do that. Or, I could take you flying. 

Um, yes please.

To say I was excited would be a major understatement. I’ve been on a lot of commercial jets, but never in a small aircraft.

The weather was perfect on the day of the flight. I pulled into the parking lot of Flying Cacti at the Glendale Airport and looked around. Not only had I never been on a smaller plane, I’ve never been in a hangar. Actually, I think I might have been in one at Luke’s Airforce Base when I was a kid on a field trip. Obviously I don’t remember enough of that for it to count, though.

Before Takeoff

John opened the hangar door to reveal a blue and white Van’s RV12. Wow! I couldn’t help but run my fingers over the glossy exterior. I could already tell that the glass dome covering the cabin was going to give incredible views, and propeller on the nose just begged to take us for a spin.

John whipped out a checklist to show me all the things he had to check before taking the plane up. It was a long list. As he pointed out, if something goes wrong with your car, you pull over. If something goes wrong with the plane, you fall out of the sky. I had been a little bit nervous at the idea of being way up in the air in a small aircraft, but after seeing how thoroughly everything had to be checked, the trace of nerves I had vanished.

During this process, it was cool to get to ask questions about how the plane worked and what every little thing did. For example, the static ports, two tiny pinholes in what looked to me like screws, use air pressure to give the pilot information about speed and altitude. I never cease to be amazed by engineers and their ability to create and pay attention to all the details. Or to create a flying machine that can carry two people and only weighs about 800 pounds.

Once all the checks were done, John pulled the plane out of the hangar and we climbed in. For my book, I needed to know the steps to start the plane and taxi down the runway, so he talked through everything as he went. When the propeller started whirring into a blur, I could feel it pushing air right into the cabin through the vents that serve as air conditioning.

My heart started beating a little faster. I was in real prop plane, about to go up in the air!

Flying!

John taxied down the runway. We waited for a couple of other planes to take off, and then he powered the plane forward, lifted the nose, and suddenly we were up in the air. Just like that. I felt a huge smile stretching across my face. Wow, the views were way better than they are in a jet with the giant wing slicing through my view out the tiny window. I could see the whole dome of sky above and the earth rapidly falling away below.

We flew above Phoenix Raceway, over the top of the Estrella Mountains, and into farm country I didn’t even know existed behind the mountain range. Below us, brown pinpricks wandered around—cows grazing in the sunshine. The Gila River snaked through the region, feeding the various canals that turn the landscape green despite the desert beige that stretches in all directions beyond the Phoenix area.

In the Air

Since the episode in my story involves a non-towered airport, John took me to Buckeye Airport for a touch-and-go landing, meaning the plane landed on the runway and took off again without stopping. I got to hear all the pilots talking to each other through my headset, communicating in the absence of a tower to coordinate landings and takeoffs.

It’s kind of hard to understand all the different voices through the headsets, which is why pilots use the NATO phonetic alphabet to reduce avoid confusion when they communicate. It sounds like some sort of secret code. Charlie Oscar Oscar Lima!

I had a lot of questions I wanted to ask about the way prop planes work, what would happen if the pilot stopped flying for a couple minutes, how to read the dials on the control panel (although this plane had a screen instead). And I did eventually manage to find the answers to all these things. For a while, though, the scenery and experience was so overwhelming that all I could do was look out the window and take it all in.

Eventually, it was time to head back to Glendale Airport. I searched the landscape for the freeway and the Cardinals stadium to get a sense of location. Wow, we had gone a long way, even though it didn’t feel like it! Back over the Estrellas we went, and soon the landing strip came closer and closer.

Landing the Prop Plane

“Every landing is a crash,” John told me. “The question is, how well are you going to control it? A good landing is one where you can walk away from the plane. A great landing is one where you can fly the plane again.”

Every time I fly, I dread the sensation of touching down. Turbulence doesn’t bother me in the least. Landing? Ugh. Usually, I grip the seat, hold my breath, and tense up in preparation for the jolt of hitting the ground. But I didn’t want to look like a moron while sitting next to a pilot, so I did my best to brace myself invisibly.

The familiar sensation of dropping in a 1000-foot elevator twisted my insides, and then the wheels touched the landing strip . . . and it was fine. I guess there’s a big difference between the feeling of landing in a 400,000-pound jetliner and the feeling of landing in a two-person plane that weighs less than half a ton!

Back at Flying Cacti

John taxied the plane back to the hangar. We rolled past a party in one of the other hangars (the party being nine seniors in lawn chairs) and got a glance at someone’s fancy two-seater, and then we were pulling off the headsets and climbing out of the plane. The owner of Flying Cacti came by for a chat, and one of the employees stopped his truck for a minute to say hi, giving me a sense of the community there.

What an experience! I had always thought of flying a plane as some kind of scary and mysterious process. I figured I had a better shot at getting sprinkled with Neverland fairy dust than grasping the concept of how airplanes move in the air. Although I never took physics (marine biology is way more fun, guys), the basic concept sounds pretty crazy. You’re fighting one of nature’s most basic forces, gravity, by harnessing different forces: thrust and lift.

What I realized from my time in the air is that, yeah, being a pilot takes a lot of skill, from understanding the NATO phonetic alphabet to keeping tabs on all the processes happening inside and outside the plane. But there’s also a sense of wonder to being in the air, controlling a flying machine, seeing the world from a whole new angle. There’s a lot of science involved, but really, science is just another word for magic.