Highest Duty Read Free

lines stretched along the highway. He pulled up the nose of the plane to clear the wires, but that action caused him to slow down and lose lift. His plane slammed down nose-first into the ground, and he died instantly.
    No one had come yet to collect the wrecked plane, and so there it still sat at the end of the airstrip. I walked a quarter mile up to it and looked inside at the blood-splattered cockpit. In those days, airplanes had only lap belts, not shoulder harnesses, and I figured that his head must have hit the instrument panel with great violence. I tried to visualize how it all might have happened—his effort to avoid the power lines, his loss of speed, the awful impact. I forced myself to look in the cockpit, to study it. It would have been easier to look away, but I didn’t.
    It was a pretty sobering moment for a sixteen-year-old, and it made quite an impression on me. I realized that flying a plane meant not making mistakes. You had to maintain control of everything. You had to look out for the wires, the birds, the trees, the fog, while monitoring everything in the cockpit. You had to be vigilant and alert. It was equally important to know what was possible and what was not. One simple mistake could mean death.
    I processed all this, but that sad scene didn’t give me pause. I vowed to learn all there was to know to minimize the risks.
    I knew I never wanted to be a hot dog—that could get me killed—but I did make my own fun. I’d tell my parents and younger sister to step outside our home at an appointed time, and then I’d fly over and waggle the wings up and down to say hello to them. We lived in such a sparsely populated area that regulations allowed me to fly as low as five hundred feet above the house. My family couldn’t exactly see my face, but they could see me waving at them.
    By October 1968, after seventy hours in the air, I was ready to try for a private pilot certificate, which required a “check ride” with an FAA examiner. I passed, which allowed me to fly with a passenger.
    I thought the honor of first passenger ought to go to my mother, and my logbook shows I took her for a ride on October 29, 1968, the day after I got my certificate. I put a simple little star next to the flight data in the logbook; a small acknowledgment of a special moment. It was the 1960s equivalent of an e-mailed smiley face.
    My mom didn’t seem nervous that day, just proud. As I helped her into the back seat and strapped her in, I described the sounds she would hear, what we’d see, how her stomach might feel. The upside of my being so serious, I guess, is that I struck people as responsible and able. I wasn’t a flouter of rules. And so my mom had confidence in me. She just sat back, her life in my hands, with no urge to be a back-seat driver. She let me chauffeur her around in the sky, and when we landed, she hugged me.
    The possibility of having passengers opened up a new world, and after I took my sister, my dad, and my grandparents for a ride, I found the courage to ask someone else. Her name was Carole, and she was a cute, slender girl with brown hair and glasses. We went to Denison High together, and we were also in our church choir. I had a crush on her, and I liked to think she had noticed me, too. There are girls who are good-looking and know it, and have the luxury of getting by on their beauty. Carole was attractive, yet she didn’t carry herself like those girls. Even though she wasn’t overtly outgoing, she had an open, friendly manner that just drew people in.
    No girl had ever expressed much interest in my experiences as a pilot. This was long before the movie Top Gun , and in any case, I wasn’t Tom Cruise. Besides, flying was an abstract thing. No one saw me doing it. It’s not like I caught winning touchdown passes and had my picture in the local paper. Everything I did was out of view and high in the sky. If I mentioned flying to girls, they never seemed hugely impressed. It sometimes