Flight Club

Need a new perspective on the city—and want to leave your recession-era problems on the ground for a few hours at a time? Go to pilot school.

By Jim Gullo

Photo: Ron Wurzer

Ready for takeoff: Don’t let the gauges and dials intimidate you.

Back in his office, Wilson explained that the $350,000 simulator is the only one of its kind in North America. With a panoramic projection screen, precise simulations of the ground environment (including the Space Needle), and a flight deck that is an exact replica of a Diamond DA42 TwinStar’s cockpit, it’s the best videogame I’ve ever played.

“It used to be that flight training started with sitting you down and telling you all about carburetor heat and the way engines worked,” Wilson said. “But now it has completely changed to scenario-based training. I don’t need to tell you about the principles of flight.” In other words, it’s like learning how to play a videogame until the routines are so ingrained that you’re ready to take them airborne. I can do that.

So then we flew for real. Wilson took me out to the tarmac of Boeing Field and we conducted a lengthy preflight checklist of a real Diamond DA40 DiamondStar aircraft, with a single propeller, plush leather seats, and a Plexiglas bubble canopy. Flying these planes is an odd and exhilarating combination of simple, mechanical tasks, like untying the airplane from its moorings and removing the rubber sleeve on the pitot airspeed device, and complicated evaluations of the vectors and navigation components that pop up on the electronic Garmin screens in the cockpit.

Photo: Ron Wurzer

We yelled, “Clear,” and this time the propeller really turned. We taxied and talked to the tower. With Wilson at the helm, we got to 60 knots and rotated, and then we were -really flying. A thousand feet up, the plane did something that the simulator didn’t: It shook from a small pocket of turbulence. I shook, too, and politely declined to take the controls when Wilson offered them. There was just so much to remember, and I was enjoying the views too much. We flew over Bainbridge Island, landed at Paine Field in Everett, and took off again. And then I did take the joystick and flew us over Lake Washington. It was simple and harrowing and thrilling all at the same time: I found that I really did want to know the principles of flying, what made it go up and, even more importantly, what bonehead move I could make that would cause it to suddenly go down. Wilson took the controls back and landed us. Ma, that really was me flying. If I had a few thousand bucks to burn, I could learn to enjoy this. Mr. Boeing, Mr. Wright, the other Mr. Wright: I dip my wings in symbolic tribute to your astonishing ingenuity.