Flying has never been one of my favorite activities. From the first time I set foot on an airplane until now, I have dreaded the thought of placing myself in a hollow metal tube and blasting through the skies at 500 mph.

No, I don’t like to fly.

Perhaps my aversion to aviation has its origins in my childhood. One psychologist friend once said it was because I fell out of a tree when I was six years old. I don’t think so. I think it may have more to do with my initial trip in an airplane.

I took to the air for the first time when I was 18. Here I was, lounging on the halcyon beaches of southwest Florida, enjoying the life of a recent high school graduate. Like most kids my age, I was busy with important activities like chasing girls and deciding what I wanted to do with my life. Unfortunately, Uncle Sam poked his beak of a nose into my life and made the decision for me.

Uncle Sam told me I wasn’t going to go to college, ogle bikini-clad women on the beach or even become a monk.

Uncle Sam told me I was going to be a soldier.

Two weeks later I was herded through the induction warehouse in Coral Gables, where I was poked, prodded and processed. When I entered the building I was an innocent civilian. Two hours later, I was a member of the U.S. Army in spite of the fact that I had other plans. One week I was basking on the warm sands of Sarasota County. The next week I was crawling through the cold mud of Augusta, Georgia.

After being inducted, a group of us newly minted soldiers were packed aboard a bus and taken post-haste to Miami International Airport, herded onto a jet and transported to the gates of Hell, otherwise known as Ft. Gordon. This was the first time I ever set foot on an airplane. I was horrified. I held my breath as we took off and I don’t think I exhaled until we exited the plane. To make matters worse, we encountered turbulence throughout the entire trip, some coming from bad weather and the rest coming from Sergeant Pike, who stood at the front of the cabin and yelled at us through a toothless mouth for the entire trip.

My next air trip occurred less than a year later when I was granted emergency leave to fly home for my grandfather’s funeral. As you can see, my first two flights took place under less than enviable circumstances.

Over the years, however, I have to admit that I have grown at least moderately comfortable on airplanes. I have flown across country a number of times, to Europe once and to China and back twice. Long flights are better in some ways. You have more time between the terrors of take off and landing.

Having become somewhat accustomed to flying in big jets, by the early 1980’s I gained a degree of airborne confidence. That’s when I did something incredibly stupid.

Even the thought of going up in a small airplane petrified me to the point of near panic. I was reading Emerson at the time and he said that a man should do what he feared most. Emerson’s logic seemed irrefutable and so, when I was offered the chance to take to the skies in a small, single engine aircraft I accepted. In doing so I learned another irrefutable truth.

Emerson was wrong.

My first trip up in a small plane was not for a brief spin around the airfield, nor was it for a short hop to see my house from the air. The first time I set foot in a small plane, I flew from Hartselle to San Francisco and back. It was a horror beyond description.

My two buddies, both pilots, sat in the front of the Cherokee Six and had great fun scaring the beejeebers out of me. For two days I lived in mortal terror, wondering if my next breath would be my last. To make matters worse, the first day we ran behind schedule due to a refueling delay and had to fly into a makeshift airport in the Arizona desert after dark. Not my idea of a fun-filled vacation.

My friend, the co-pilot, attempted to reassure me.

“Don’t worry about a thing,” he said. “In pilot training they teach you exactly what to do if you have engine failure in a single engine aircraft at night. There is a set procedure to follow and there’s nothing to it.”

“Oh yeah,” I responded with doubt. “What are you supposed to do?”

“Well, you keep your eye glued to the altitude reading,” he said in a serious tone. “When you get down to about 200 feet, you turn on your landing lights.”

“Is that all?”

“Well, no.” he continued. “If you don’t like what you see, you turn them off.”

I was not amused.

Facing my fears, I flew in that small plane several other times. I flew to Chicago twice. I flew to Savannah. I even flew to New York. Still, after going through all this, staring my deepest fears square in the eye and doing what I thought I had to do to be a man, I am convinced of one salient truth.

Emerson was wrong.