Called to Fly
Photos/Jon Watkins.
By Jon Watkins
On the hazy Monday morning of September 7, 2020, I found myself alone in the pilot’s seat of a Cessna Skyhawk 172S, cleared for takeoff on Runway 16L at Reno-Tahoe International Airport. With no flight instructor beside me and tower operations chatter in my headset, I took a deep breath, did a quick scan for other traffic, and paused to reflect on how I got myself into this mess. I was faced with the task at hand: demonstrate that I could safely perform a takeoff, short flight, and landing in a single-engine aircraft as its pilot-in-command, a prerequisite for obtaining my private pilot license. Meanwhile, a few hundred feet away, my faithful ’92 Chevy longbed sat full of what little I had left after being a vagrant for the past five months. Yes folks, somehow a homeless man in his mid-20s had managed to find his way to the controls of a small general aviation aircraft; out of context, I’m sure I could’ve been the Secretary of Homeland Security’s worst nightmare that day.
However, this is what I’d been training for over the past four months, and by this point I’d caught the bug; flying was in my blood. In the 26 years I’d been alive nothing caught my attention like it did, pushed me to improve like it has; it gives me focus, and makes me feel like I can do almost anything. Growing up I was nothing special; just another kid born to a teenage single mother, making my own sacrifices to help her build a life she’d dreamed of since she was little. There was never time for me to consider what I wanted to do with my life, or invest in my own desires. I really was—in every sense of the phrase—just along for the ride. Once I’d started my college days at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), I believed that maybe teaching college writing was what I wanted to do and that if I pushed hard enough I could make a lifetime career out of it. So I tried my hand at being a graduate instructor during my Masters of English program. That went well, at least until March hit.
I loved teaching introductory college writing to UNR’s first-year students, as well as supporting their academic and professional growth. Looking after them and watching with pride as they achieved things with writing they never dreamed possible kept me content and made me feel fulfilled. When the lockdown began though, all of our lives changed. I became homeless, some of my students became homeless, resources began to dwindle for all of us, and so many of the plans we had built together for the semester had to be triaged or scrapped for their mental and emotional health. Then it got worse. Losing contact with them one by one while being homeless and remote, sometimes only being able to watch through Zoom sessions as they suffered beneath the crush of our “new normal,” felt like death by one thousand cuts. On the night before my 26th birthday in May, despite getting confirmation that I passed the comprehensive exams for my master’s degree after two years of teaching and research, I sat in the back of my Chevy the whole night crying. I missed my students, I had no home, I had no job, and I had no hope. It felt like there was nothing left for me, no way out of my situation; everything was falling apart.
For better or for worse, the lockdown left me with too much time to think. After days of headaches, lament, and general unrest, I realized I needed to start fresh, develop some sort of new skill that would get me out of bed and keep me sharp, and give me a sort of fulfillment like I had in my times as a graduate instructor. It would have to be something unlike anything I’d ever done, something that would take me out of my own head. Something intense, a bit crazy—an unprecedented act for unprecedented times—I would try to learn how to fly planes and become a pilot. So I set up a discovery flight with a flight school attached to Reno-Tahoe International. I figured even if this little venture didn’t work out, I’d at least get an hour or two to reflect on some things from 7,500 feet above ground level.
From the moment I arrived at the flight school I could tell that the people running it, pilots with years of experience, were a different breed. They walked and talked with a sort of calm confidence that gravity couldn’t dare extinguish, and they seemed to hold their heads high knowing that no matter what happened behind the stick, their skills and training would get them out of it in one piece. I wanted to walk and talk like that. The guy handling my discovery flight, Levi, was a mellow man who reminded me more of a NorCal surfer than a seasoned pilot with a penchant for diving off mountains in a squirrel suit. He introduced me to our aircraft for the morning, Skyhawk 495SP, and told me to take the pilot’s seat—yes, the pilot’s seat, despite the fact that I’d never so much as been within two feet of a single-engine aircraft prior. But this was what the man told me to do once our pre-flight aircraft inspection was complete, and I complied. He took the co-pilot’s seat, which thankfully had a set of redundant controls, and walked me through the checklists associated with getting the plane from the hangar to the runway as we taxied out.
To be honest, I don’t remember much of what happened once we were wheels up; Levi explained some things about aerodynamics and what was being said on the radios, but all I could think about was the fact that I was at the controls of this mad apparatus and actually flying it without crashing. That, and how quiet my mind was. I woke up that morning with at least 20 thoughts in my head about housing and what I was going to do for a job, but up there in that Skyhawk, my brain just didn’t have the ability to agonize over such things. Levi handled the landing, and once we were shut down and disembarked, he asked me without skipping a beat, “So when are we flying again dude?” After a few deep breaths, I told him next Tuesday. And so it began, my first steps into the world of aviation from the early throes of a global pandemic.
Fast forward 7 months, and there have been numerous times where I’ve asked myself why in the world I chose this path. I’ve had flights where I botched certain maneuvers, frustrated instructors, irked air traffic control, and of course just plain messed up. And of course, flight school ain’t cheap. The ten grand I’ve thrown at it could have gone to all sorts of more pressing things, but I don’t think any of them could have given me the freedom and respite general aviation has as I’ve tried to find my way through this pandemic and in my life.
If you can believe it, flying is easy; it’s everything that happens outside of the cockpit that’s hard. Dealing with bills, keeping a job, paying rent, looking after people you care about, and taking care of yourself, none of that relies on systematic, proven checklists. None of it comes with a Pilot’s Operating Handbook, or fits into nice, neat books and resources issued by the FAA to help pilots do their jobs in ways that ensure the safety of the general public. When I’m at the controls of a Cessna 172S, that bird demands my full attention; there’s no room to think about anything else, no mental resources I can spare to try and fix anything happening outside of flying the plane. As odd as it sounds, it’s cathartic for me, to only have just the plane to think about. Whether I’m able to make a career in aviation happen or not, or pass the FAA checkride for my private pilot license in the coming weeks, I’m called to fly.
Jon Watkins is an aspiring pilot and a recent Master’s of English graduate from the University of Nevada, Reno, where he studied first-year composition pedagogy. Most days he can be found at work, pursuing his fitness goals, practicing maneuvers in a Cessna Skyhawk 172S above the northern Nevada area, or just tinkering with his venerable chariot, a 1992 Chevy C1500 truck called Lancelot.
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