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Pre-Flight

This little volume contains some flying stories. Some of them are true and others are made up. The rest, which is to say most of them, fall somewhere in between. The majority are about airplanes and pilots, but a couple are about birds, and there’s one that’s mostly about an airport terminal but is also a love story. They’re all adventure tales in their own way.

We should mention there are also a couple three in which flying is a metaphor for something else and airplanes only appear in the periphery. These stories are a little different and you’ll recognize them by what the great American philosopher Mack called hooptedoodle. They have a little more décor than the others and like old Mack said, they try to sing a song or two, maybe paint a pretty picture. That’s just the storyteller opening it up a bit, like a pilot who throws a few barrel rolls and loop-the-loops into a flight. As any aerobat will tell you, even when she’s carrying paying customers experiencing the thrill of an open cockpit and inverted flight for the first time, those loop-the-loops and barrel rolls are still mostly hers. We’ll readily admit it can be downright selfish on the part of the pilot or the writer, which is maybe why not every passenger likes to loop-the-loop and not every reader likes hooptedoodle. And so out of deference to differences in taste those stories make themselves known pretty quickly so that the reader can take them or leave them as she pleases.

Not that we’re suggesting the regular stories are straight-and-level the whole way. There’s one about an Air Force fighter jock who acquires a mysterious wingman, another is about a broken heart, and there are a couple about a World War II warbird that may or may not have a soul and a conscience. There are honest-to-goodness war stories, ghost stories, tall tales, and stories that pilots will swear are true even though they aren’t in any history books or old news accounts. The true stories have been stretched and embellished by retelling so that they might sound more fabulous than the made-up ones, but don’t let that fool you. A man or woman who lives a story only lives a fraction of it, especially if the experience involves subjects like love, life, death, or an emergency landing. That kind of story happens so fast that after it’s all over and the man or woman sits down in the tavern years later and tells it he or she usually discovers there’s not much to tell at all. Even worse, the part there is to tell is so scrambled it lands on its audience with a thud and hardly merits a glass of beer on the house.

Of course there are exceptions, but in our experience this is a dependable generalization. It’s only in the retelling and the re-retelling and so forth that the details emerge like the constellations in a twilight sky and the story gains its fullest expression. Pilots nurture stories like children: each teller contributes his or her experience in the hope that he or she can make it a little better, a little wiser. It’s far from a novel metaphor (if you’ll pardon the pun) but it explains a great deal about why storytellers, meaning all of us, tell stories. Each retelling adds to a story’s development and maturity until one day it mostly stops changing. When it comes to flying stories pilots distinguish instinctively a story that needs guidance from one that’s done growing, the subtle difference between it couldn’t have happened like that and it didn’t happen like that. By the time you finish with this little volume of flying stories you’ll have an idea of how to tell the two kinds of stories apart. If we accomplish that then our time together will have been well spent.

Meanwhile it will help to bear in mind that truth has different connotations at 30,000 feet. Facts are just the beginning, and as often as not they just confuse matters. Think of the stories that follow as primers to a world that’s bigger than any of us can imagine.

That about completes our pre-flight.

A final word: don’t worry should we encounter headwinds, fog, icy conditions, even enemy fire. The characters and storytellers in this little volume have spent a good part of their lives aloft, and we’re in excellent hands indeed…