Inside the Sky

"1672G, you're leaving my airspace. Squawk VFR. Frequency change approved." With that, Dover Air Force Base radar kissed me off at a couple thousand feet in the air. My blip on their radar went from something they had to monitor into an unidentified flying pest. But not a pest for long, because I would soon fly off their screen.

Near the Delaware and Chesapeake canal, especially when it's cloudy, on Philadelphia's radar you're nothing but an unwanted piece of chaff. So the approval to "change frequency" was something of a cruel joke. There was no frequency to change to; no one would watch my flight.

I knew this, but I flew on anyway, slipping between a couple of cloud layers, which hid both the earth and the sky. An aircraft sandwich on white, I was. Perfectly legal, though this is the fastest way to get killed in a little plane. The fat clouds will suck you in. Soon, only the instruments would know where to find the earth. Which you'd figure out soon enough anyway, if you fell into a graveyard spin.

Sometimes, though, you need to be by yourself. Hidden in the clouds is where I had to be. "Inside the sky" is how one aviation writer puts it.

Pilots always lie to their passengers—a true but disconcerting fact. Pilots lie to keep passengers from panicking in the cabin. But only a fool at the yoke would lie to himself.

Which is why, I think, I was here. To be alone, to think, to pray. I had a decision to make.

Help me, I prayed.

When bad pilots think they're going to die, they also pray. They plead with ground controllers, they beg God for mercy.

Help me decide, I pleaded still, as the plane somehow flew safe and steady.

Then I remembered that good pilots don't pray or plead or beg. They struggle to live. And their struggle, to live or to die, often ends with something unexpected.

"I love you," they whisper into the cockpit recorder, hoping that someone will hear, and understand.

At that, I quit pleading, and my mind was made up.

The best way to get out of the sky is to leave the way you came in. I turned home. I glanced at the clouds above, thinning now. Clouds can play cruel tricks on you. They're hard to read. So when the sky above opened up a bit and the eye of the sun poured through, it was hard to say if this was a divine blessing, or just a pointless coincidence.

Three minutes later, my blip crawled back onto Dover's screens. Dover Air Force Base sends soldiers to war. Dover also welcomes back the living—and sometimes brings home the dead.

Yeah, I fit in there, somewhere.