Every pilot knows that flying is an intense mixture of uncommon rewards offset with exposure to risk. After all, while airplanes provide some of the greatest pleasures in our lifetimes, they do have to reach a lethal speed just to get airborne and then fly at thousands of feet above the ground. Balancing the risk/reward equation is something my wife and flying partner, Martha, and I have been thinking about ever since we had our airplane accident.
To understand how transformative this event was for us, let me go back in time. Flying had us hooked right from the start. As soon as the opportunity arose, we learned to fly together and enjoyed every minute of it. It didn’t take long before we started exploring the country in our airplane. The day after we got our certificates, we took off in our Cherokee 140 from our home field in Indianapolis on a flying trip that took us to Arkansas and Florida, and before we had our certificates for a week, we made our first international trip to Grand Bahama.
