FROM THE EDITOR
Terry C. Muck
October 1, 1984
I flew in a ten-passenger Cessna 401-402 from Kansas City to Topeka last week, and I realized something had changed in my feelings about small aircraft.
I used to dread them. My Uncle Harold's crop duster in northern Minnesota, the World War II-vintage aircraft I occasionally flew on softball trips, the helicopter across San Francisco Bay to Oakland one dark, windy night-all of them left me with a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach. There was an element of exhilaration, I must admit, much like what I felt as a child when my dad accelerated our '56 Chevy just before mounded railroad tracks on the blacktopped roads of rural Indiana. But the element of fear dominated whenever I climbed into the belly of a small airplane.
Thus I developed a standard rule of my traveling thumb: any airline that had to ask my weight at the check-in counter was too small to get my business, much less my trust. I stuck to that rule for at least a decade.
But on my trip last week, I realized those powerful fears had disappeared. Apparently five or six flights on a Beaver into the Canadian back country to fish for lake trout and muskie had removed the last vestiges of small-aircraft phobia. It was gone along with the fear of Ferris wheels, first days at school, and the first day on a new job.
As I flew over eastern Kansas (even after having to tell my weight when checking in), I realized I don't fear too many things anymore. It was symptomatic of the flattening of life's peaks and valleys that age seems to bring. My lows are less deep-but my joys are less joyous. Can this be a good thing?
On the flat plains below I could look ahead and see Lawrence, the plane's first stop, and beyond that, Topeka. The prairie stretched unbroken as far as I could ...
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