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Perspectives
Something In The Air When We Meet
If you’ve spent much time traveling general aviation, you’ve made good friends. You may have no idea what they do for a living or what kind of car they drive, but the words, “Where you heading?” can lead to easy conversation and lasting friendships.
On our return trip from EAA’s AirVenture this year, we met some new buddies when we stopped in Mansfield, Ohio, to wait out bad weather in the northeast. As if by magic, seven people in five airplanes came out of the sky and converged on tiny Mansfield for the night, enjoying dinner and conversation as though we were old pals meeting up for a reunion after a long separation.
If this could simply be chalked up to AirVenture and the number of small airplanes making the trip home from Wisconsin, the story would hardly be noteworthy. But this type of reunion happens every day, at large and small airports across the country, as like-minded souls meet, bond, and move on.
There must be something about this mode of travel, or the type of person who is drawn to it, that makes us unique, because we recognize that special quality—whatever it is—in those we meet on our journeys.
Sure, the conversation starts with flying, and if you talk for any length of time, flying will invariably keep weaving into and out of the conversation. But more often than not, talk turns to personal issues about our lives, our dreams, what we’ve done and what we hope to do. Flying is a unique preoccupation. And though we all have our own reasons for doing it, each of us recognizes a perspective that’s hard to pinpoint, but we all know it’s there when we get together. You could say it’s just something in the air. That common bond is more important than what kind of house we live in or what kind of business we are in. It’s not just a love of flight. It’s something more.
At the restaurant that night, amid the howls of laughter as a member of our party told how he decided to try parasailing while being towed behind a snowmobile, a fellow aviator at the table said to the waitress, “I never met these people until a few hours ago.”
You wouldn’t have known it to look at us. 
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