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In May 2022, an air-traffic controller in Florida received a frantic call. The pilot of a single-engine Cessna 208 had collapsed, leaving the sole passenger—with no experience at all flying a plane—to fend for himself in the cockpit. Remarkably, the controller was able to direct the passenger to take the controls, reach an airport, and safely land.

The story went viral for several days, perhaps in part because we can all imagine ourselves in that nightmare come true. Could we figure out what to do? Would we live to tell the tale? In the past, I would have asked myself those same questions. But this time, I had answers, and knew I was up to the challenge of landing a plane. At age 52, I had just earned my pilot’s license.

All my life, I assumed that flying an airplane was something other people were born to do, not me. Then, during the pandemic lockdowns, my life took an unexpected turn. Unable to go on a trip, something I love doing, I turned to traveling virtually: I started playing the newly released Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 on my PC. As my enjoyment grew, so did my curiosity. I bought an online “ground school” course—a series of video classes that teach flying basics—to learn more, and took the logical next step: I signed up for real-life flying lessons. My family and friends were slightly puzzled, and wondered if I was having some kind of midlife crisis.

It shouldn’t take a crisis to push us outside our comfort zones, but sometimes it helps. For so many of us, the pandemic was a year of disrupted plans and dashed hopes. I heard people talking about “a whole year wasted.” I hated the sound of that, and rebelled at the thought of resigning myself to it. I wasn’t trying to fulfill a lifelong dream. I didn’t have any fantasies of being Tom Cruise in Top Gun. I just wanted to see what life still had to offer. So I learned to fly.

For millennia, humans looked up at the birds in the sky and wondered about flight. Little more than a century ago, we worked out how to do it ourselves. Since then, flying has become a thoroughly mundane, if poorly understood, part of modern life. We fly all the time—for business, for vacations—but for most of us, traveling by plane is like a magic-carpet ride, and the pilots are the genies. We rarely give much thought to what makes it possible, and when we do, it tends to make us nervous.

The key conceptual leap to understanding flight is changing how we think about the air. Because air is invisible and transparent, almost a void, we tend to think of it as lacking substance. In fact, air has very real substance. Years ago, I stood on a clifftop in Wales, on Britain’s west coast, and was nearly knocked off my feet by an 80-mile-an-hour gale blowing in from the North Atlantic. The pressure on my face was so intense, it gave me a headache. This is the kind of force that keeps a 560-ton Airbus A380 up in the sky.

An airplane is designed to create such airflow (by propelling itself forward rapidly) and to allow the pilot to manipulate it to move the plane in a desired direction. The trickiest part of flying is that because we can’t see how the airflow is interacting with the airplane, a pilot must learn how to feel it.

This ocean of air that we’re surfing in a plane is every bit as changeable as a storm-tossed sea. I’m not talking about the bumps and swoops from typical turbulence. As alarming as these might at first seem, airplanes are also designed to right themselves in response to an occasional gust. But other conditions—thunderstorms, fog, ice—can pose a real danger, and I was surprised to find out how important understanding the weather is for pilots. We passengers get frustrated—maybe even feel incredulous—when our flight gets canceled because of “bad weather.” It can be hard to believe that mere fog or a thunderstorm could pose a problem for a modern airliner, with all its technological gizmos and guidance wizardry. In fact, airlines spend a lot of time and effort trying to plan around weather, for both comfort and safety.

In the case of a small private plane—such as the single-engine Cessna 172 that I learned to fly—the potential hazards are more serious still. As a student pilot, I found myself carefully scanning the weather reports, like the lookout in the crow’s nest of a sailing ship watching out for a squall or storm, to decipher the conditions I might face or should avoid altogether. An old saying among pilots goes: “It’s better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air than in the air wishing you were on the ground.” Sometimes they heed that advice; sometimes they don’t.

The great killer of new pilots is spatial disorientation. When the weather closes in and you can’t see much outside your windshield, you can’t trust your own sense of balance and motion. You can feel as though you’re flying level when in fact you’re spiraling downward in a dive or climbing so slowly and steeply that you’re about to stall. That disorientation is what most likely happened to John F. Kennedy Jr., flying through murky twilight across the dark, featureless ocean to Martha’s Vineyard. It’s also what contributed to the crash that killed the musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and others after they took off in a small plane with an inexperienced pilot on a snowy night.

The solution is to learn how to fly looking only at the instruments in the cockpit. If you’re like me, you have occasionally stolen a glance into the cockpit while boarding an airline flight, only to be dumbstruck by the plethora of dials, panels, and knobs. In fact, there are six main instruments—including the attitude indicator, the altimeter, and the airspeed indicator—that a pilot learns to recognize and read, no matter what kind of aircraft they are flying. A pilot also has to understand how these devices work, and how they might malfunction, so as not to be misled by an inaccurate readout. Learning to rely safely on instruments, rather than one’s senses, takes a lot of training. But that’s what makes flying possible in less-than-perfect conditions.

During my very first lesson, my instructor told me I’d be performing the takeoff. Gulp. In fact, taking off is relatively easy: Push the throttle to full power and nudge the rudder pedals, left and right, to keep the plane pointed straight down the runway; at a designated speed—55 knots in pilot parlance, or roughly 68 mph—gently pull back on the yoke, and suddenly you’re flying. As the instructor will tell you, “The airplane wants to fly.”

My instructor, in this case, was an energetic 20-something woman who was working to become an airline pilot. All but one of my instructors turned out to be women, which makes my experience an outlier: There’s no reason flying should be a “guy thing,” but to a large degree it remains so. As of last year, women accounted for just 6 percent of licensed pilots in the U.S., 8 percent of certified instructors, and 5 percent of airline pilots. For an industry facing a shortage of trained personnel, this represents a huge reservoir of untapped potential. The gender imbalance may be starting to change, albeit slowly: 15 percent of student pilots now are women, and the women in aviation are, on average, nearly eight years younger than the men.

Learning to do anything from a teacher half your age is a humbling experience. And being humble is good, because compared with taking off, learning to land a plane takes a lot of practice. An aircraft in flight is full of energy—it wants to fly, after all—and the goal in landing is to run out of that energy just as you’ve positioned the plane inches above your aim point on the runway—no sooner, no later. Add in a gusty wind blowing the plane sideways and the hard ground rushing up at you, very fast and very real, and you’ll appreciate how setting the aircraft down is usually the most challenging and scary thing for students to learn.

I have to admit, I struggled for a while with my landings. In the end, I took another sort of lesson from my 8-year-old daughter, whom I was teaching to throw and catch a baseball. The ball’s trajectory was a mystery to her at first, and she was afraid the ball could hit her. Gradually, she learned to see the ball anew and anticipate where it would be. I realized that’s what I had to do: train my brain to process approaching and landing on the runway, rather than being overwhelmed by the rush of events. It took some work to develop the sense of control—to feel that I was landing the plane, rather than the plane landing me.

The first “solo”—flying the airplane all by yourself without an instructor alongside you in the cockpit—is the crucible for every new pilot. You get to do it only when your instructor is convinced that you have your landings down pat. Typically, you fly a short circuit from takeoff back to landing, a routine you practice over and over again.

If you’re truly ready, the flight itself is almost an anticlimax, because every step becomes as routine and familiar as the back of your hand: flying parallel to the runway, 1,000 feet in the air, ease the throttle back, lower your flaps, and push the nose down. Announce your last two 90-degree turns over the radio, maintaining a steady descent as you bank the plane. Line up with the runway and adjust your power if you’re too high or too low. Then, as you near the beginning of the runway, pull the throttle all the way back to idle and let the plane level off just as the runway’s edges appear to widen. Shifting your line of sight toward the end of the runway, gradually pull back on the yoke as the plane loses speed and lift, to make the touchdown as gentle as possible. Bump, bump … apply the brakes, and you’ve done it.

Well, sort of. After your first solo, much remains before you get a pilot’s certificate. You have to learn how to navigate, talk to air-traffic control, fly at night, and deal with emergencies (such as a fire or engine failure), then make several extended solo flights to prove your mettle. You also have to pass a detailed written exam, and finally a “checkride,” in which an FAA-appointed pilot-examiner puts your aviation knowledge and flying skills to the test.

A few weeks after earning my license, I began to write about my experience. As a newcomer to this world, I wanted to offer a window into what learning to fly is really like: the broad and challenging body of knowledge you have to absorb, the skills you must master, the regulatory hoops, the frustrating setbacks—and yes, the thrill and sometimes shell-shocked sense of accomplishment you get to feel, if you persevere.

Over the course of my journey, a surprising number of people told me the same story: They had taken a few flying lessons once upon a time, and even soloed. But then their training petered out. According to flight schools, an estimated 80 percent of student pilots end up quitting before they get their license—and that doesn’t include all the people who never even begin.

Time and money play a role, for sure, but I think the bigger factor is psychological. Aviation is intimidating. Unless you have family and friends already plugged in to flying, who can encourage and guide you, it’s easy to lose heart—or never imagine you could do this in the first place.

Many of the early aviators, such as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who wrote The Little Prince, waxed lyrical about the wonder of flying, of seeing the world for the first time from a bird’s-eye view. Today, for better or worse, that novelty has worn off. We can all enjoy that view for as little as a $100 ticket, while munching on a bag of pretzels in a window seat. But while learning to fly myself, I discovered that a deeper, more enduring wonder remains. This comes when you no longer shrug off the fact of flying as a given, but hold the controls in your own hands and feel the plane’s responses. Then, in that moment, you realize that you are in control of a machine that is defying gravity.

Learning to fly is hard, but hard things are worthwhile. I recently heard an interview with the actor Harrison Ford, who, like me, became a pilot in his 50s. “I didn’t really know if I could learn anything,” he said, explaining what had driven him to fly. “I hadn’t learned anything—other than lines—for a long time. I wanted to engage my brain in some process that would wake it up, and resupply it with challenges.”

We all fly, but in the rush of our lives, we tend to regard it as either a mundane chore or an unapproachable mystery. What flying can be, instead, is an adventure well worth the effort to appreciate and understand.

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