“The control of fear is a necessary part of the inner work of flight.” William Langewiesche Breathe. Relax. Do the ‘what-if’ work ahead of time. All these are part of the Inner Work of Flight. Quote is from Langewiesche’s 2010 book Aloft: Thoughts on the Experience of Flight. And yes, his Dad wrote Stick and Rudder.
“Mountains are not fair or unfair, they are just dangerous.” Reinhold Messner, All Fourteen 8,000ers, 1999. Wikipedia says this about Messner: He made the first solo ascent of Mount Everest and, along with Peter Habeler, the first ascent of Everest without supplemental oxygen. He was the first person to climb all 14 eight-thousanders, doing so without supplementary oxygen. Messner was the first to cross Antarctica and Greenland with neither snowmobiles nor dog sleds and also crossed the Gobi Desert alone. He is widely considered as the greatest mountaineer of all time.
I live in Phoenix, Arizona. So the picture isn’t of English stinging nettles, but the top of a big prickly saguaro cactus. However, Shakespeare’s line from 1591 still rings true today: “’Tis dangerous to take a cold, to sleep, to drink; but I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.”
I was lucky enough to get an advance review copy of a new book coming out in March 2019: The Impossible Climb: A Personal History of Alex Honnolds’s Free Solo of El Capitan and a Climbing Life, by Mark Synnott. It’s pretty dang awesome. Highly recomended. Alex Honnold, the world’s greatest climber, went 3000 feet up shear mountain face, alone with no ropes. An achievement so incredible that the New York Times called it “one of the great athletic feats of any kind, ever.” And since free solo climbing involves personal high-stakes risk-management at altitude, as pilots we can both … Continue reading The Impossible Climb
“The air is an extremely dangerous, jealous and exacting mistress. Once under the spell most lovers are faithful to the end, which is not always old age. Even those masters and princes of aerial fighting, the survivors of fifty mortal duels in the high air who have come scatheless through the War and all its perils, have returned again and again to their love and perished too often in some ordinary commonplace flight undertaken for pure amusement.” Sir Winston Churchill, ‘In The Air’, Thoughts and Adventures, 1932. Churchill was an avid pilot in his younger days, but ended lessons in … Continue reading The air is
