You would be amazed at how easy it is to get a flight lesson, as I was.

You buy a thing on the Internet, drive to the local airstrip, show them your government-issued identification, and then the boomer pilot you specifically selected immediately takes you out to the Cessna 162s parked outside. He walks through the preflight check with you (assuming that you know terms like aileron and rudder, or preflight check for that matter), only really taking any appreciable time to explain how to spot sediment in the fuel sample he draws from the wing tank.

Meanwhile, you find yourself surreptitiously eyeing the very analog construction of the plane, with thin metal panels and a window that would be at home on a small city bus. There seem to be actual cables that run taut from the cockpit to the flappy things on the wings, which seem less than ideal from a reliability perspective, and the obvious lack of parachutes. Even with parachutes, the clunky door with its pull-up handle would probably get stuck in an emergency situation, giving the contraption an abstractly hearse-like vibe.

“Alright, let's get in” he says, as we squeeze into a very intimate and uncomfortable cockpit. “And let me handle talking to the tower" he adds, unnecessarily. It was at this moment that I coincidentally and quietly realized that airplanes are not steered on the ground using the steering wheel thing, but rather one's feet controlling the tail flappy thing. Clearly, we had a mismatch in expectations of skill and training.

He takes off while talking about ’Nam, and then two minutes into the ascent says:

“Ok, you have the yoke. Level off now at 2,500 feet.”

Meanwhile you’re thinking:

Wtf—there’s no written test or classroom lesson? Does he know all my information about flying comes from Chuck Yeager’s autobiography? Does he think I've passed some sort of test before I got here?

So you scramble to find some number on the digital instrument array that maybe represents altitude and is rapidly approaching 2,500 perhaps, while also trying to remember that pushing the yoke in means plane go down.

Then he’s like:

“Good. Ok, now we’re going to bank 30 degrees to the left. Don’t forget rudder along with aileron.”

And you realize: holy fuck, gramps thinks I’m a flight student instead of some random Internet asshole.

But he seems chill with the bank, says “ok well done,” and you just keep going with it. He lets you fly for the next two hours, applying minor corrections like:

“Don’t forget to set the trim to give your hands a break.”

and:

“You’ve got a death grip on the yoke there—loosen up a bit.”

All the while he’s chuckling reassuringly that you’re a natural and he never gets to enjoy the scenery.

At some point he says:

“So if that 45-degree bank didn’t bother you, let me show you how to recover from a stall.”

And then he pushes in a knob for the throttle and stalls the plane.

You shit yourself just a little bit, because holy fuck: the whole thing is mechanical. You’re not too high above your evening commute route. You recognize exactly which house you’d crash into if it all went wrong.

But gramps jams the throttle back in at just the right time and chuckles to himself as the plane recovers.

“These planes are pretty easy to recover from,” he says. “Anyway, let’s fly towards Half Moon Bay.”

“Where’s that?” I ask.

“Right there beyond those hills,” he says, “just before that advancing fog bank. But don’t go too close to that because we’re still on VFR, and that would be bad.”

What is VFR again? I think to myself, while I try to remember what he said about rudders and ailerons as I jam the yoke to the left heading towards the Pacific.

Now he wants one hand on the throttle at all times, saying “nose up, nose up” a little too urgently for my liking. So I yank up, and the little horizon indicator on the only digital part of the dashboard yanks around like a video game—except the hills of Hillsborough are way too close out of the left canopy window that I manually latched shut half an hour ago, and way too real for it to feel consequence-free.

Once the plane levels out, he chuckles another joke about my death grip on the yoke, and I relax a bit as we fly towards the ominous oncoming fog bank.

And then, all of a sudden, he looks out of every angle of the canopy—his head darting around with urgency—like he was dodging flak outside Saigon again.

“Gotta keep an eye out for other planes out here,” he says. “This is a practice area. But we should be fine.”

“How would we know?” I ask.

“Oh, we’ll know,” he says, his eyes now on his phone.

We approach the small airstrip at Half Moon Bay and thankfully, he takes over the controls and touches down—only to immediately take off again at the end of the runway.

“You’ve got the controls again,” he chuckles. “It’s a beautiful day. Take us out by the ocean there and then we’ll loop back and go home.”

Rudder, ailerons, airspeed, bank angle again, and we’re finally heading back to home base.

As we line up for the landing, he switches to pilot voice and mutters reassuringly to tower, getting clearance to land.

“What’s with the pilot voice?” I ask.

He drops into a hushed serious tone, barely distinguishable over the endless tower chatter in the headset, and says:

“Oh well, I don’t want to be inappropriate so I’ll say this carefully, but all aviation audio equipment was designed for mens’ voices—so we speak in that tone to be reassuring.”

It doesn’t really add up, but I don’t have time to think it over as my death grip is returning because I’m flying over the 101 freeway. I just drove my car down that very road and walked into this plane with two audiobooks worth of unrelated military aviation history as my only prep, and now I’m attempting to maintain 1,500 feet on the approach—which is what I assume they call it.

Thankfully he takes over the controls as the runway lines up over our right shoulder. As we descend incredibly slowly and peacefully towards the asphalt, he mutters a final request for wind direction to tower, looks at me and chuckles that this is an advanced maneuver as if to dissuade me from giving it a go, jams the rudder hard to instantly point the plane diagonally into the approach line, and touches down dead center.

We taxi back to the parking slot like it’s some sort of boat returning to a casual dock. No drama. No spectacle. Not paying any attention to my white knuckles or sweat-soaked back.

“Want to help me roll the plane back to its parking spot?” he asks.

We quietly get out and physically push the remarkably light flying machine back to its spot, moor it with a literal chain, and walk off to the cramped cubicle of a flight office to be upsold on more lessons.

Then I walk back to my car parked a few feet away, and get back on the 101 freeway—never looking at the light aircraft passing above in the same way again.