Why Do We Do The Crazy Things We Do?

By Wayman Dunlap
Editor/Publisher

The issue has always been; why do we do what we do?

I have been a pilot even longer than I've published this paper and have lost more than 100 close friends (my very best friend, in fact), acquaintances and business clients to airplane crashes - usually very high time, experienced former test pilots, airshow performers, airline drivers and instructors. But down they all went.

Yet the lure remains.

"Can't happen to me," mentality, you know. A perpetual, "Hey, y'all, watch this!"

So why would a person would strap himself into either a 70 year old cloth and fabric antique or a kerosene burning rocket sled with wings and count on everything going right, all the time, which is what we do.

And of course, according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, nothing ever goes right all the time and things always gets worse (they call it entropy). We act as if Chaos Theory was just a myth.

Yet here we are, blissfully sailing along at two miles high, counting on those 50 year-nuts and bolts to hold together, the struts and fabric not to rot and tear away, the weather not to sneak up and smite us from behind. It's probably the same reason people ride motorcycles and drive very fast cars and ski down impossible slopes.

Because once we're doing it, no one can save us, but us. We can't count on anyone else to land our plane, or avoid that tree, or maneuver that bike around that blind corner at an insane speed.

It reaffirms our manhood (or womanhood, more and more) and our ability to cheat fate, to laugh in the face of danger, to say, "I did it." It speaks to the hunter in us (I have no idea what it means to women, except to prove they can do anything a man can do).

It's why cowboys ride nasty bulls or bucking horses, for peer respect, for self-congratulation but also (in flying, anyway) it's fun, it's freedom, it's sitting perched on top of a cloud watching amazing sunsets no one else will ever see, it's watching passengers drop their jaws on their first flight as the ground drops away.

In short, it's a mystery.

But it's also self-congratulatory; when they hand you that piece of paper that says FAA licensed private pilot, your ego know no bounds. You try every way possible to get the fact that you're a pilot into every conversation (until your friends tell you to shut up about it).

And as you drive away from the airport after a successful flight (any flight in which you can use the airplane again), you look at all the ground-bound folks in the other cars and know that you can do something only one in 100,000 of them can do or would even try. Moreover, fewer than one in four who start flying lessons ever finish.

I've heard from many folks who think riding any motorcycle any time is a death wish yet I've been doing it for 60 years and, until I discovered sport bikes, had a total of one crash (not counting my years racing motocross, when it was a given) ... and that one was at 30 mph on a freeway on-ramp where someone dumped oil.

And I wasn't hurt and rode the bike home. Yet I've written more obituaries in this newspaper in the past 30 years of aviators I knew well than I ever imagined possible.

Still, I keep flying, riding bikes, driving fast, etc. Not because I have a death wish, but a "life" wish. It's not a mid-life crisis (I'm well past that) but mid-life "clarity."

It's in our blood, this slap in the face to fate.

We're a peculiar type of carbon-based life form; you don't see animals thinking up new ways to bend or break themselves. They only have one goal, to survive.

Men (and women, more and more) are different; we not only want to survive, we want to feel exhilarated, adrenaline-rushed and damn good about ourselves because we can do something few others can. Our heroes are fighter pilots, test pilots, airshow performers and astronauts - not exactly the kinds of professions where you can count on living long enough to check out assisted living homes.

I wouldn't have it any other way and deep in your hearts, neither would you.