From the time I was young I have had a fascination with aviation.
I don't necessarily mean the nuts and bolts of aircraft, why they fly, or how the wind currents work, but rather the idea of aviation itself: to launch oneself into the sky, look down upon a retreating terrestrial world, and rise into the heavens above the clouds into the wild blue yonder.
My favourite moment of flight has always been take-off. When a plane takes off, you get that feeling of exhilaration as you head steeply upward toward the great unknown.
Perhaps I come by this fascination with flight honestly. My father was an airframe mechanic in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) who at one point in his military career worked on the Snowbirds. When I was a kid, he taught Air Cadets, and both my brothers were also in Air Cadets. My dad, even after he left the air force, always retained his love of aircraft.
Going back a generation, my grandfather flew in the Second World War with the RCAF. He was a navigator and bomb aimer on a Halifax aircraft. He and his crew flew 42 bombing missions through the war, and he and his captain were both awarded Distinguished Flying Crosses for their service. The minimum required service for bomber crews in the war was 25 missions before they could muster out. It was considered one of the most dangerous tasks with one of the highest casualty rates in the war.
My grandfather was once asked why he never got out once he had reached his required 25 missions. He answered casually they had just never thought about it and kept going.
One of the highlights of my life was meeting my grandfather’s old captain in Hamilton, when I was attending university at Wilfrid Laurier in Waterloo. He invited me down to the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton to meet him on the day he was telling his story to the museum’s Living Memory Project for posterity. Afterward, we received a private tour of the museum and special access to the museum’s Lancaster bomber aircraft, which is similar to the Halifax but slightly smaller. The captain and I sat in the cockpit together. He sat in his old pilot’s seat and I sat in what would have been my grandfather’s seat beside him all those years ago.
The tactile sense of the aircraft made me imagine rising up into the sky with the full roar of the four engines shaking up everything inside, rising toward an uncertain fate amid the stars above, a sense of destiny on the wing.
Sitting in that seat, I felt I understood my grandfather better. And it helped me articulate what I love most about flying. That sense of destiny, of rising to meet something so uncertain with open eyes and a ready heart, to encounter whatever awaits ahead.
