Who We Are
By Gordon Baxter
March 1997
 Let me give you this personal insight into the reason for this particular column. I am epileptic. Lost my medical about 19 years ago. For me this took some really serious readjustments. Flying has been a vital part of my emotional and physical existence for most of my life. I guess this peaked when I was partners in a Mooney M-20C. I was serious about my commercial and IFR tickets, although my real joy was stick-and-rudder flying in the Stearman.
But during all this time my relationship with Flying, the only aviation magazine I’ve ever written for, was as simple and solid as life itself. I believed then, still do now, that of the growing number of aviation publications, Flying was mother and home. I rejoice in the growth of publications for general aviation, but from way back when it all began up until today, my relationship with Flying has been unique. Flying has always been the standard we could always believe in.
There are many aviation publications. I have read them ever since War Birds, a two-bit pulp fiction magazine, and to some degree still have affection for them all. But when I got into Flying I believed then – still do today – that here was the aviation magazine by which all others can be measured.
In any economic/social/technical revolution, some sort of leader emerges and is recognized. The emergence of Flying is not a random or haphazard event. The magazine has been careful and selective in those it promoted to positions of trust. This is much like the promotion of the people who are a part of general aviation itself. Those who are not highly motivated enough to advance their skills become headlines in the grist of sensational press: “Plane crashes, all onboard killed.”
You may or may not have noticed that Flying neither accentuates or ignores operational mishaps. Its subtle fairness in this emotional subject lays a basis for believability which has served the magazine well over the years. Nothing can be said to aviation hysterics; a calm intellectual approach needs no further explanation. Out of this grows a belief in who we are and what we have to say. There is a high level of truth in the act of flying itself.
I save them all, but have never stopped and counted how many issues of Flying I have written for. I’ve written Bax Seat in Flying longer than I can remember. Twenty years or more, from here the details no longer matter. What does matter is that in my lifetime as a mediocre pilot and a middlin’ good teller of tales we seem to have established a very deep human bond with eachother. I’m old enough, here at 73, to know this does not happen unless there is some tie of mutuality and trust.
I have written for Flying through changes of owners, editors and publishers, but have observed through it all that here is the aviation publication whose fundamental consistency is something by which all others are measured. Oddly enough I never know much about these people. Have never been to the home office. I hear from them when I have begun to drift afar. Their letters and memos are classics in how to deal with a temperamental, creative writer.
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