Tag: real danger
How Learning to Fly Helped Ground Me
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.
Afghanistan Changed Me – The Atlantic
In January 2009, I flew to Dubai and got my first taste of what I would come to know as the Terminal of Lost Souls. Dubai International Airport was one of the glitziest in the world—enormous and modern and filled with luxury shops and lounges. But that was only Terminals 1 and 3.
Terminal 2 was for the discount carriers flying to South and Central Asia and parts of Africa—places like Uzbekistan, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The passengers were generally
The Most Haunting Truth of Parenthood
Do we ever really understand our parents? Certainly not when we’re children. If we’re lucky, we begin to understand them later. We might one day realize, for example, that they carried burdens we couldn’t see. Sometimes I wonder if I might have learned something important about what was to come in adulthood had I been paying closer attention when I was little, but no, I couldn’t have related then. It is only in recent years, when the most maddening, haunting