Masters of the Sky

I close the door quietly behind me, trying not to wake my parents who were sleeping down the hall. The cool night air greets me as I jump off the back step, it's scent a mixture of that of freshly cut grass and salt air carried by a north wind from the bay. It is quiet tonight, the road empty of the traffic typical of summer weekend evenings. I head east to the neighbour's garage beside which our community's mailboxes sit and with a quick look around to confirm the coast clear, I hoist myself on top of the mailboxes, and pull myself up onto the roof of the adjacent garage. From here you can see the lights on the other side of the bay, blinking in the distance. I lay my head back on the peak of the roof of the garage and focus my gaze upwards. Somewhere above the low rumble of a jet engine cuts through the silence. It's blinking strobe lights give the eastbound flight's position away against the backdrop of a starry sky.
I imagined the crew of this particular flight, sitting in the dim light of the cockpit, guiding their aircraft toward some destination on the other side of the Atlantic. In my mind I had built those who fly these aircraft up to be almost superhuman in their abilities. All knowing and unerring; they were the masters of the sky.
Upon moving west to learn how to fly, it was this benchmark that I figured the crew of the eastbound flight sat upon, and that I set out to achieve for myself. There were the inevitable setbacks and strokes of luck that mark the progression of many pilots and looking back now I admit that I was anything but a natural. While there were many examples around me of those who seemed happy to settle for average, I was fortunate to have a select few who pushed themselves, and sometimes unknowingly, me with them, to a higher standard. They were instructors and students, co-workers, captains and first officers. Their reasons for striving for perfection may have been quite different from my own, but that was of little consequence.
One such captain recently told me that a well rounded pilot is a combination of skill, knowledge and attitude, brought together in the correct proportions. Like the loaf of bread mom baked during my childhood that could have saw a productive life as something more adept at scrubbing dishes than being eaten, missing an ingredient, or adding a particular one in incorrect proportions can make all the difference. Fortunately for those who do not come standard equipped with these key ingredients, as it has been said in the past, it is in the trying that we get there.