The Wild Blue Yonder

It's customary for flight instructors to wait until the last moment to tell student pilots when it's come time for them to solo. The idea is that advance warning would subject the neophyte to a potentially debilitating case of nerves. When I was working toward my flying license my instructor asked me one day after we had landed to taxi over to the base of the tower. When we got there he announced that he would be getting out. "What," I asked, "am I supposed to do?" "You're going back up in the air." That's all the warning I got. Seconds later I was taxiing out to the "active" runway. As I was following the controller's instructions and "holding short," I went over a mental checklist, going through all the things I would have to remember once I was cleared for takeoff: full throttle, watch airspeed, "rotate" nose, hold the angle of attack as the place lifted off, maintain proper airspeed, check instruments, turn off fuel pump, watch altitude, turn crosswind, level off, dump flaps, ease back on throttle, make airspeed correction, and so on, knowing that soon I'd be twelve hundred feet above ground level in an airplane with no one but myself to get me back on the ground alive. I glanced out the window, and there, fluttering over the wing, was a small butterfly. "You little son of a bitch," I said out loud, "it's so darn easy for you."