Bad Altitude

You are flying cross-country in a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. I’ll bet you an overpriced on-board sandwich that three-quarters of your fellow passengers can’t explain how that half-million-pound machine stays aloft. “It is something about lift, and curved wings,” they will say. Really? If the wing’s upper curvature matters, how can planes fly upside down? Most will add, “I don’t know, and I try not to think about it.”

I sympathize. I am approaching three million miles on just one airline, and I still prefer not to think too much about it. As you will read, I have flown on nearly every type of aircraft—warbirds, private jets, Cessnas, hang gliders, sail planes, balloons, military cargo planes, biplanes, and helicopters. I have even skydived and taken flight lessons. I got close-up, pulse-raising insights in shoddily-built airliners in Cold War Russia and recently in North Korea. There were flies aboard my flight in Turkey. I think they helped keep the plane in the air.

There were some hairy moments along the way: I crashed a hang glider. I nearly knocked my flight instructor unconscious over Germany’s Rhine River. Our commercial airliner overshot the St. Louis runway. I was aboard a military C-130 cargo plane that, well, had a potentially disastrous problem on an overseas flight.

I experienced all this with hopes of fully comprehending—in my gut, not just in theory—the physics of flight. In this book, you will learn the simple word uttered by a flight instructor that enabled me to finally make sense of it all. Still, I think some magic is involved. So, fasten your seatbelt, and come fly with me.