When Life Doesn’t Imitate Art

I flew an airplane today.

I’m still kind of in awe of this. It’s strange to fly as a pilot in 2021, when, for all intents and purposes, I can’t fly as an airline passenger. It’s even stranger to be at the controls again when I’d all but given up hope of renewing my medical just a few short years ago.

If you’ve read Faded Embers, you might have picked up on how Avery’s quest to fly again (despite her injuries received in Asrian Skies) has paralleled mine—though unlike me, she was ultimately unsuccessful by the end of the book. And you can probably guess why her story proceeded as it did—when I first drafted the book in 2018, I knew the odds of me ever obtaining a medical certificate again would be slim. Throwing her struggle into the book was healing, in an odd way.

But then things changed. A few months before Faded Embers’s release, I learned I did have a chance. Slim, yes, like the chances always are in cases like mine, but definitely not zero, and I wanted to fly. So the very same month I was preparing for a book launch, I got my stuff together, applied for my medical, and waited on the FAA’s response.

Don’t worry—I won’t bore you with the bureaucracy of deferred medical applications and special issuance authorizations. All I’ll say is that six months after I published the book I’d written while certain I would never fly again, I received a third-class medical certificate in the mail. Less than a month after that, I was current and legal and well on my way to becoming proficient again.

Six months after that, I’ve discovered that it’s really easy to take something like flying for granted—I definitely did back in college when I was healthy and had easy access to free time, airplanes, and safety pilots. As I flew my second ILS of the afternoon today, I felt a little of that feeling creep in.

But no.

Because you guys, I was flying an airplane.

And maybe someday Avery will fly again as well.