Dream Ingredients

You can take on any endeavor with all the confidence in the world and still, you will always have that shadow of doubt in the back of your mind causing you to ask yourself, 'Can I really do this?' Today was quite the challenge. Three hours of hood time with air as bumpy as the back 40 coupled with 100 degree heat (cooled to a nice 90 degrees or so at altitude). Two and a half hours in I'm asking myself what in the hell I've gotten myself into. Starting to feel the nausea I was warned about, I'm not believing that I, the one whose stomach has learned to handle just about anything, am beginning to feel a little crappy. Am I really cut out for this? And then, right at the moment I realize the minutes on my stomach are numbered, she says it. "Okay Jeremy, everything looks great. Now lets do some stalls." Now I know I have family and friends reading this so I won't dictate the thought that went through my head, but you can imagine. Stalls when you can see are one thing. But when you can't see out of the plane and you stall a plane, you brain doesn't get warning of the impending stall from your eyes. You know its coming but your body doesn't. And then it happens - you stall and your stomach bounces off your nasal cavity and then tries to exit through your ass. Ahhhh, the joy of instrument flight training. But I quickly shrugg off the unsettling moment when I think to myself, 'You know, Jeremy, you could be printing off a bank contract, getting ready to sell that smelly family their first new Focus. And all Grandma wants is to make sure it has a cupholder for her spit cup.' And then I'm back to the reason I came here to follow this dream. Nausea and all, this is a pretty incredible thing to get to do. And then at the end of the day, Claudia says, "Well, you're doing great. You're flying the DA40 like you've been flying it a long time." That was almost all the encouragement I needed to hear. The rest came at dinner when my fortune cookie told me that if I believed in myself, I WOULD succeed. Isn't that the stuff real dreams are made of?



One last note: several of you have asked about what I'm flying so here's a picture of it. It's an incredible flying machine. The Diamond DA40 -