A pilot friend—now in his late 70s and, for health reasons, no longer flying—recalled donating an unusual homebuilt of his to a museum. It was the airplane in which he had done a lot of his early flying, including episodes of scud running in the Pacific Northwest that he would occasionally describe with that combination of relish and shame that pilots reserve for situations of their own making from which they were lucky to escape with their lives.
“When I taxied up and shut down the engine,” he said, “a warm feeling filled my whole body. And I realized that it was the feeling that this was the last time I would fly that airplane, and it hadn’t killed me.”
