Low and Slow

Low and Slow

“Flying low and slow, buddy. You’d better learn to fly low and slow first, buddy.”

Uncle Roger was my favourite uncle, but when I was eleven I really thought he didn’t know very much. He was just a crop duster and that was all he knew. Flying low and slow was not what I planned to learn when I learned to fly. Uncle Roger did take me up on cloudless days. I had my own bomber jacket and hat. He showed me what flying low and slow felt like. And I knew that I would become a pilot. I had spent many hours looking up at the sky - cloudy or clear - when I heard the drone of a plane. I followed the sound with my eyes until it faded into the distance. Jet trails excited me. Pure white trails criss crossing a clear blue sky were the most dramatic. I was too young to travel on my own, but I travelled to all the Aeronautical Museums I could find by Internet when possible. My young heart planned out my future. Study aircraft, flight, everything I could find about getting off of the ground and being as bird up next to the sun and the stars. I smiled at my childhood memories.

I didn’t become a pilot, at least of the big planes. Life didn’t move me close to the sun, probably a good thing. I did keep my fascination with flying and aircraft. I was able to get and maintain a vocation in mechanics. It sustained me while I went to university and learned more about flying and the history of aeronautics. Keeping faith with my memories, I did get my pilots license and flew small planes. I was my own mechanic for the one small plane I was able to buy. It was a love like that of a young man with a shiny new car. 

But ‘low and slow’ stuck in my memory as much as the wide blue skies. When I was struggling with anything, I could put myself in that small aircraft with Uncle Roger as we flew low over the prairies in the sunshine. Everything smoothed out. I could even remember the hum of the motor. My problem in the moment became just like the trees and rocks below me. Smaller and more manageable. I could see which ones would need work to get around and which ones were just too big for that day. Flying low and slow really was the lesson I needed to learn. I closed my latest aeronautical history book up, turned the light out and went off to sleep.

“The reason birds can fly and we can’t is simply because 

they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings.”

~ J.M.Barrie, The Little White Bird