By MARK JONES JR.
The day was blustery. Gray clouds hid the sky, and an occasional gust of wind brought biting cold and threatened to tear the foam airplane out of young hands.
The airplane was almost as big as my 10-year-old boy, and his fleece gloves were oversized and slippery, making it hard to wrestle against the north wind. As his dad, I walked beside him, carrying the radio control unit, my own black fleece gloves cradling the complex unit with its levers, antenna, switches, and lights. The scene was a first for father and son.
Anyone in the park that day would have seen a pilot showing a young boy how to do a preflight on a radio-controlled aircraft and, had the passers-by stayed long enough, would have seen the first takeoff of the Christmas gift.
But when it happened, nobody in the park witnessed the launch of a “small unmanned aircraft.” Instead, they witnessed dreams take flight.
For my child, the sky and the future and its possibilities filled the mind’s eye, and he saw himself flying. At the same time I closed my eyes and pictured countless takeoffs I’d seen or flown and the airplanes I owned as a child.
Years later, I rubbed my eyes and opened them to the blinding sunlight of the Mississippi morning. Blinking, that scene from long ago drifted from my memory, replaced by the one unfolding in front of me.
As we made our way across the ramp towards a parked jet, my son walked in front of me carrying his daughter, just over a year old. He wore a green flight suit, brown boots, and leather flying jacket, much like the uniform I wore. There were small differences that anyone who looked closely would notice, but most eyes were on the little girl staring at the sky.
Jet engines roared overhead, where an orange aircraft danced through the skies. A small hand pointed, her whole body twisted towards the sky.
In just a few days, this little girl would unwrap her own toy airplane complete with two pilots, flashing lights, and jet engine sounds. I wondered at the many threads that converged in this moment.
The young pilot before me would earn his wings of gold in less than two hours, a waypoint on his journey.
It was only a few years ago that he took his first flight in single-engine, piston aircraft based at Jack Edwards Field (KJKA) in Gulf Shores, Alabama.
General aviation is the “taxiway” used by many military aviators, the first screening phase in the path to being a professional pilot in the armed forces.
If you happened to be at the flight school, you may not have even noticed the aspiring naval aviators, dressed like any private pilot student, talking to “ordinary” CFIs, starting their pilot journey.
My path was similar, but at Cook County Airport (15J) in Adel, Georgia. The wings of a Cessna 152 carried me aloft that first day, but today, at this Naval Air Station, it was the wing of a T-45 that held the wobbly legs of the infant reaching out to her father, my son.
I had no idea what her future held, and that thought flashed through my mind, in contrast to the certainty that I understood the next leg of my son’s journey.
Just as he was starting his military pilot journey, I was on final approach for mine. In just a few months, I would hang up my flight suit with its Air Force pilot wings for the last time.
But this wasn’t the last leg of my journey. General aviation beckoned to me again, extended an invitation, and the Part 91 flying of an experimental test pilot is what I pictured with the utmost clarity as I considered my own future during that moment.
As I look at the fabric of this flight suit that I am wearing, the threads woven into the colorful patches, I am reminded of the fabric of this life. I see countless threads woven together: My own father’s love of aviation and the sight of his Air Force flight suit, just like mine, and the almost identical flight suit of the naval aviator my son has become.
I remember the aircraft my own son flew as a child and the radio controls he operated compared to the radio signals bouncing off satellites to a much larger aircraft I piloted from halfway around the world.
I think fondly of the Cessnas he has flown and the ones I have flown, including the 172 with floats that carried me and a Designated Pilot Examiner less than a year ago, when I earned my seaplane rating.
So many threads woven together — the legacy of so many pilots who have touched my life, woven into the fabric of so many more pilots I have instructed or whose lives I have had the honor to inspire.
That story unfolds in different ways for different people.
In some cases, it starts at an early age with a simple paper airplane.
Countless unpowered flights of the imagination lead some of us to grass fields on windy days during the holiday season. The seasons change, and the children grow faster than our own hair grays.
The aircraft get bigger, more powerful, and more complicated, but so do the dreams.
Every flight draws us closer to the destination, but even as we taxi onto the parking ramp, we understand that the journey is not over.
The opinions expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
