I am an aviatrix, a female pilot of fixed wing aircraft.

While other families had Life magazine or National Geographic on the coffee table, our house had Aviation Week.  There were no flight shows missed and we would sometimes go out to the airport just to watch the planes take off from the observation deck.

My father was obsessed with aviation. I imagine him as a child in the midst of Great Depression hunger, longing to fly away. It was a dream he longed after his whole life but went unfulfilled. He had been accepted into flight training by the Navy but because he developed hypertension he was forced to quit. He was only in his early 20’s.

One of my clearest memories of my dad is standing alone in Uncle Phil’s back yard at a family BBQ. A Cessna flew overhead in the bright, calm summer sky. We both watched it go by, my hand an echo of his as we both shielded our eyes from the sun.

When he looked back down, he hesitated in thought for just a moment. He turned to me with a look as if what he was about to do was something wholly unexpected, something that had only just occurred to him. He asked me, “Do you want to learn how to fly?”

It never occurred to me that I could, that women fly. In the early 80’s, it probably never occurred to him either. But what you must understand is that I was his daughter which meant I could do anything. My father believed that I could have flown to the moon and back if only I had been born with wings. I replied in 10-year-old girl excitement, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” He said, “Ok, when you are 16, I will pay for you to take flight lessons.”

Another morning, about two years later, I woke to a noise outside my second story bedroom window. I looked down to the driveway and there with a sky as bright and clear as that afternoon had been, under the tree of heaven that sheltered my room from the sun, I watched paramedics lift a gurney with my father’s dead body into an ambulance. Heart attack.

That was in August 1985. I was 12 years old, on the cusp of 13. All through high school, I told everyone I was going to learn to fly. In 1995, I took my first flight as a student pilot. Three years after that, I was a certified flight instructor with a commercial certificate with multi-engine and instrument ratings.

All because my father believed I could. And because he believed, I believed.

And because I believed, I flew.

-Copyright C.M. Mounts, June 2018