Wiggle your toes
I’ve started collecting ideas that are anti-flow. From Jonathan Bach’s Above the Clouds: A Reunion of Father and Son:
I turned a shallow left, lined up the directional gyro until the needle pointed to 36.
Another fifteen seconds in that bank and I dipped the let wing to see a little inlet, a freshwater lake with foothills surrounding it.
Richard took the stick.
“Here, I’ll just yank it around to base. Bring the power back a bit to fifteen hundred rpm.”
The takeoff was easy; landings were much different. It’s one thing to go from zero to one hundred twenty miles an hour, but do it backward?
“Uh, I don’t know…”
“Just one step at a time. Power back.”
Power Back.
“Flaps down.”
Down.
“Wiggle toes.”
“Wiggle toes?”
“Yep. Try it. Wiggle your toes.”
“Okay”
I did it. For those few seconds I was a passenger.
“Helps you relax. Am I right?”
“Hey! That’s cool. It works.”
“Makes you aware that you’re still human, that the airplane doesn’t have control of you.”
Sure enough, I had been caught up in exactly that, letting myself be an airplane.