My social media circles might have noticed this week that I have returned to the aviation hobby after a 20-year hiatus.

I always wanted to be a pilot. I became a licensed private pilot May 1, 1993, just short of 30 years ago.

I flew a lot in the 1990s, when the hobby was less expensive. My wife (then, girlfriend) Abby and I flew together in the spring of 2003. By then, the local aviation community had become less active, and there weren’t really any airplanes to rent here. She and I rented airplanes at Shawnee.

One of the reasons I am flying again now is that thanks to Ada Wings, there are three aircraft that live here at Ada to rent.

There are some myths about flying as a private pilot that I should dispel. It’s very safe. We’re not test pilots or daredevils, and the airplanes we fly are airworthy. One thing that keeps us safe is our respect for the weather, which most non-pilots don’t really understand. We don’t have airliners. Most private pilots like me fly close to home because it’s fun. We can’t jet up to Nova Scotia in a couple of hours. We fly for fun, and for the challenge of becoming better pilots.

Monday I flew with Ada Wings’ flight instructor Zach Burkhead, who gave me my first flight review in 21 years. Everything came back to me pretty quickly, but I still feel like I should sharpen my skills. My landings were sloppy, but that’s to be expected with dormant muscle memory.

The two aircraft I flew Monday were a straight-tail Cessna 150, and a Cessna 172.

Burkhead signed me off for two years, and checked me out to rent their airplanes.

If you’ve ever dreamed you would like to learn to fly, make it happen. I did, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

YouTube has recently suggested a lot of 9/11 conspiracy videos to me. If I click on one of them and watch it, YouTube mines that and suggests more. As I watch them, one thing is pretty clear: few people buy all the way in to the “official” story of the day, which says that 19 Islamists simultaneously hijacked four airliners on the east coast, flew them for some distance without effective official countermeasure, then successfully flew three of them into symbolic structures. Two of those structures, very tall skyscrapers, then collapsed in an identical fashion, and later that day a similar nearby skyscraper also collapsed in a nearly identical fashion.

The problem with the conspiracy theories is this: as implausible as the events of 9/11 seem, no one seems to be able to suggest either a more passable scenario or explain why powers that be would create scenarios that seem so inconsistent.

So, let’s break it down 9/11’s most implausible items…

• Steel skyscrapers collapse due to impact plus fires. I’ll grant you that this is a pretty hinky occurrence, and what the theorists say most often, that no modern high-rise has ever collapsed in its footprint after being damaged or destroyed by fire, is true.
• Airliner wings and engines “melt” into the side of a steel structure like the WTC towers or the side of the Pentagon. I suspect this one is related to speed; bullets go into stuff all the time and seem to melt, despite being much softer than the materials they strike.
• Airliners flying near the ground at very high airspeeds. A lot of conspiracy videos assert, and even cartoonishly illustrate, that wings of airliners would be torn off at 500 knots at sea level. As a pilot, I know a few things about speeds, and they are talking about Vne, or Velocity Never Exceed, the bug on the airspeed dial the represents sound advice from the engineers who designed and built the aircraft: if you go faster than this, we can’t guarantee the airplane will fly a like it should or even hold together. While it’s true that on the flight decks of the jets that struck the WTC, there were probably audible and visual warnings going off, and that flying a jet at these speeds would mean taking it out of service for inspection, it is not a guarantee that the wings and empennage would fly off.
• No black boxes found/black boxes found by the FBI and/or not released. This is probably a consequence of the FBI being in charge of the investigation. Only the NTSB knows how to collect and interpret such devices. A more marginal explanation might be the desire to “spare” the families the horror of reenactments.
• The planes were actually missiles that were switched for the actual planes that ended up somewhere else. Even if this were the case and for some reason you needed to shoot the WTC with a missile, why not just put it onto a 767?
• That airliners would be able to shut off transponders at a certain time of day. Actually, Occam’s Razor favors this one, as a bunch of teenage boys with walkie-talkies could have done it.

One way to measure the logic of a scenario is to examine what it accomplishes.

Certainly if you wanted to commit 9/11 from the inside, the hijacking scheme is one way to do it, but why would you? If you wanted to burn records or destroy specific buildings, a far simpler way would be to stage a fire or explosion. Or a more straightforward terror attack, like a successful version of the failed 1993 WTC attack.

Or turn it around: what did 9/11 accomplish for the U.S. government? Specifically? That’s really the biggest hole in the 9/11 conspiracy scene: what did 9/11 accomplish for the insiders?

Somebody please talk some sense to me. I certainly can’t find it from the internet’s so-called Truthers.

As I covered an Ada softball game at their field next to the Ada Municipal Airport, I couldn’t help but notice a larger number of Cessna Cardinals in the landing pattern, and an even larger number parked on the grass near the airport’s signature business, GAMI/Tornado Alley Turbo. I surmised we were having a fly-in of some kind, and as my readers know, I am a pilot, and powerfully attracted to anything related to aviation.

When I finished working my softball game, I drove next door and found long-time friend and fellow pilot Tim Roehl, who was organizing the event. After I made a few feature photos of pilots and planes, Tim hooked me up with Cardinal Flyers Association President Keith Peterson, who took me around the patch for some images of the fly-in, and to talk about flying. It was fun, and, as always, great to be in my sky again.

Seemingly fit to go along with my last post, I went on another media ride today, on a 1929 Ford Tri-Motor, with many of my old media buddies.

The plane was exactly as I expected it; primitive, mechanical, loud, awkward. I’ve flown may planes and wanted to fly many more, but I had no desire to fly this one.

It was a fun ride, however, and it’s always nice to see my media buddies and my pilot buddies.

Journal entry, Sunday, June 5, 1994:

I departed Ada in a rented Piper Cherokee 160, N5422W, intending to fly to Tulsa International Airport (my friend Robert lived near there at the time) at about 3 p.m., climbing to 3500 feet. It was choppy at that altitude, but I couldn’t get higher for a scattered to broken layer of mixed towering cumulonimbus. Visibility was good and because of the weather, I kept my eyes open for alternate airports. About halfway along, I had to go between two large thunderstorms, but it got clearer as I approached Tulsa.

I navigated mostly by VOR; there are surprisingly few landmarks between Ada and Tulsa.

I could see huge towers of a thunderstorm over Tulsa and began planning my return to Ada or, if necessary, Okmulgee (which was close). I tried to tune in the Tulsa International ATIS, but at first I wasn’t receiving it, then suddenly it came on the air and simply reported, “contact approach for rapidly changing conditions.”

I listened to approach for a few minutes, and heard them vector an American Airlines MD-80 back to Oklahoma City. I decided to go to Tulsa Riverside, which is on the other side of Tulsa. I called approach and they gave me two VFR vectors for spacing, then handed me off to the RVS tower. They had me fly three miles downwind, which almost put me into the growing thunderstorm to the north. I slowed the aircraft. Finally he called my turn to base and cleared me to land. In a light rain I touched down, perfectly smoothly.

I had dinner with Robert and his (then) girlfriend Karen. During dinner we nicknamed her Snow Pea (which stuck with her). We went back to Robert’s apartment and photographed Karen, who looked very beautiful.

The flight back to Ada was very different from the trip from Ada. From the very moment I took off, it was as smooth as I’ve ever flown. In the safe, warm glow of the red lights of the instrument panel, I climbed to 6500 feet in perfect visibility and started receiving the Ada VOR. I called Fort Worth Center to request flight following, and apparently I was their only low-altitude business for the night, because they never gave me an advisory.

On eight-mile final I canceled radar service and arrived with an even smoother landing.

Life is spectacular.

In the summer of 1992, I was encouraged by a young lady I was dating at the time to embark on a lifelong dream, to learn to fly. I began my training in August with an excellent pilot named Phil Lawrence, in a sharp-looking Cessna 150 with the name “Old Gomer” painted on the engine cowl. My training was limited to three or four sessions a month, but as fall went on, I got more and more comfortable flying the 1600-pound two-seater.

On December 20, 1992, on a bone cold, slate grey day, after flying three touch-and-go landings from Ada’s runway 35, Phil and I stopped the airplane on a taxiway. He endorsed my logbook, got out of the airplane, and said “Shoot three more,” meaning fly three touch-and-goes by myself. I taxied to the threshold, prepped the airplane by the book, and took off. I remember how much lighter and more responsive the plane felt without the weight of my instructor in it. My three landings were flawless.

Once back in the hangar, by tradition, Phil cut off my shirt tail to “hang it out to dry.” Later that day I got on a jet and flew to Florida for Christmas, with a once-in-a-lifetime story to tell.

Soloing is a seminal moment in every pilot’s life.

I am counting on most of my fans to be like-minded in the way I let music carry me away. For example, if I listen to “Crystal Baller” by Third Eye Blind, it takes me back to my first vacation with Abby in 2003. If I listen to “Mercy Street” by Peter Gabriel, it takes me back to the first weeks I spent with Kathy Sterbenc in 1986. If I was listening to something a lot during a season, that song takes me back to it.

Tonight my iTunes shuffled to “Subterraneans,” one of the three movements of the “Low” symphony by Philip Glass, and I was instantly taken back to one particular season, the summer of 1993. I was logging a lot of Cessna hours back then. The airplane I rented most was a Cessna 150, and it was cheap enough that I could sometimes fly a couple of times a week.

It was on one of those days that I wanted to play around with the airplane and my experiences. That hot summer day in 1993 I decided to climb that little airplane to 10,000 feet. It took quite a bit of patience. Unlike airliners, by the time you get a Cessna 150 to 10,000 feet, it’s 108 horsepower engine is struggling to climb 100 feet per minute. By the time I finally got there, it was an absolute pleasure to feel the cold rush into the cabin through those infamous Cessna “beer can” vents at 40 degrees cooler than it was when I left the summer-hot tarmac.

I excitedly noted in my log book, “10k feet!”

Another piece of music that brings back that summer with intense longing is Grieg’s Piano Concerto In A, Op. 16 – 2. Adagio. I can listen to either of these pieces of music and close my eyes and be there again, alone in that tiny airplane in that big sky, just flying for no other reason than to be flying.

1992, was strange, painful, wonderful and exciting year for me. In 1992, I bought my 300mm f/2.8. In 1992, I started learning to fly, and on December 20, I soloed. I can still remember that cold, grey morning; we shot three touch-and-goes on runway 35, and then Phil, my flight instructor, got out of the plane and told me to do three more. I remember how much better that Cessna flew with just my 150 pounds aboard. When I was done, he did the shirt tail tradition. I don’t know if non-pilots know about this, but when you solo the first time, your instructor is supposed to cut off your shirt tail and “hang it up to dry.”

The middle part of my 1992 was occupied by spending time with a very beautiful but somewhat troubled young lady who believed in spirit photography. In May, I photographed a quadruple fatality (my famous “Funeral Crash” photo that published around the world), then came back to the office to soup film and give something to the AP. That’s when she came in and asked to see my film, because she wanted to see if there were ghosts or spirits in my photos.