“I’m a retired technical publications editor. I love aviation, I love to fly. I love airplanes, and believe there are none which could be called ugly. Much like a vulture, buzzard, pelican, or even a bald eagle, on the ground, walking around with all the grace and coordination of a drunkard, both bird and airplane, when they take to the sky, are transformed into a beautiful wonder of flight, with more grace in the movement of a feather or a left-turning bank than a lifetime spent on the ground.

“To see a weathered, beaten airplane, landing gear tires deflated, windscreen smashed in by vandals, bird nests sprawling out of the convenience afforded by a curved engine nacelle – that’s truly a shame. A metal band once wrote the music behind an aircraft manufacturer’s video of emergency maintenance, and one of the lines read, “We’ll get it in the air flying / where a plane ought to be.” That is where planes belong – in the air, with the wind rushing past their wings, not on the ground. Joni Mitchell wrote, “The drone of flying engines / Is a song so wild and blue / It scrambles time and seasons / If it gets through to you.” Yes, that is an apt description of my heart’s desire.

“It’s an incessant urge to be drifting up there, above the world. Looking down on Earth from on high, the fighting, the cursing, the warring, the greed and corruption, all fade. Flight is not a place to run away to – it’s a place to recover all the pieces of yourself that you spread all over work, home, relationships, the world. A place to regain a sense of wonder, of awe. Only flight can remind us of our true nature. Flying in an airplane is a reminder, an analogue of us, a set of wings that we climb into and waft along on the currents of air above us.”