My interest in flying began years before my first lesson. In one of my early books, The Joy of Flying, I detailed the hours spent as a kid watching airplanes at Chicago Midway Airport (MDW), dropping nickels in the coin-operated binoculars atop the terminal’s now-removed observation deck. “Those great silver machines would gather speed and lift into the air folding their wheels away as they climbed,” I wrote. “I’d watch until I either ran out of airplanes or money. At MDW it was usually the latter. But I was hooked. I’m not even sure if I knew why, but I was hooked.”
Learning to Fly
