Congratulations on Flying Into Another Plane!

Today’s the day! You’ve been begging your parents to let you do this for months, nay, years, and today it all comes together! On today, the day of your sixteenth birthday, you’ll finally have your first flight lesson.

Your mother will drive you to the airfield along winding roads with all the sanctimony she brought to the trips to your Tae Kwan Do lessons. She’ll have the window down, juggling a lit cigarette with the Escape’s steering wheel. The two of you will be silent, though you’ll squirm in your seat a good deal more than usual.

Your mom will do her all to pretend you’re not there. If you could see inside her head you imagine you’d catch her thinking of herself as a chauffer. In your adolescent, sexually repressed brain the idea of a female chauffer will be slightly sexy, and you’ll do your best to force the thought out as quickly as it enters.

The appearance of the airfield will help, its long black land strip stretching out to the horizon. Your mother will park the car and open your door to let you out, running to the building which houses the flight prep class.

After a brief safety seminar you’ll be told that normally they don’t allow new students to fly on their first day, but because it’s your birthday they’ll be letting you take out a Cesna. You’ll leap up from your seat and cheer for joy, causing the one other girl in the class to roll her eyes. To her credit, you will look a little faggy doing it.

Then the instructor will take you out to a specially rigged Cesna, which is supposed to have its two sets of controls rigged so that the “pilot’s” set doesn’t work and the co-pilot’s does. But your mom picked a flight school with an alcoholic mechanic to save a few dollars and you’re going to board a plane where there’s been a mixup and the opposite is true.

As such when you take off, your despondent potential lesbian crush seated behind you and your needlessly creepy flight instructor by your side, you’ll have full control of the plane. By the time the flight instructor realizes that you, with your natural piloting skills, have successfully taken off and are carrying out the maneuver he wanted “you to do” instead of him it’ll be too late. You’ll collide into the one other plane in the air space around the airfield, piloted by another birthday girl who was undone by a drunken mechanic.

Congratulations on Flying Into Another Plane!