aking pictures while flying can be difficult; it's hard to do justice to either while doing both. So I rigged a simple camera with a pistol grip that lets me shoot pictures left-handed while I fly with my right. I carved the handle out of wood and cobbled some hardware together to trigger the camera. It looks like a toy that children get for Christmas if they haven't been very good. It works pretty well.

I've taken quite a few pictures with it, mostly in gliders, a few in power planes. Looking through a stack of these pictures, I noticed some that showed reflections on the canopy, curved, distorted, reversed ghosts of the cockpit: the panel upside down, the faces of the instruments in unreadable soft focus against the firmer image of the sky. As always, as I have been trained to do, I scan the sky, this four-by-six-inch paper sky:

Here and there are other airplanes, clouds, green sweeps of ground, my wingtip. I refly the moments in my memory, and my scan grows idle, lingering over details, a dreadful habit in the real sky. I pick out the ghosts in the canopy, try to read the instru- ments. Then I notice that I can see my hand.

Pale, V-shaped, the watery image of my right hand floats reflected on the canopy. It's only there in those few shots aimed upward, at another plane above me, or the details of a cloud. But there, once I've learned to look for it, is my right hand on the control stick between my knees. It makes me shiver suddenly, this voyeur's glimpse of myself in the act of flying.

This is the point at which my airplane and I touch one another. Here I tell my airplane what I know about our flight, and what I wish the two of us to do.

I am not only the airplane's source of control; I am one of its sensory organs too. Its own instruments read things I cannot see: the pressure and the motion of the air. I tell the airplane what I can detect that it cannot: our relation to the surface and to other aircraft. It tells me what it knows by way of the instrument panel; I speak to it in turn through stick and rudder.

So I look at these images of my disembodied hand and reflect on this reflection. Peering closer, I can see my legs too, the faint blue of my jeans blending with the sky. Stick in my hand, rudder pedals down there just out of sight, the points at which I touch and guide my airplane: the reins and stirrups of my Pegasus.

Happily, I note that my touch is gentle. The stick is held at the base of my fingers, not jammed down in the web between thumb and fist. No white knuckles and no inattentive slackness: pressure without force. If a hard gust hit us, my hand would close in response to the stick's kick: we share a reflex arc, this plane and I. We extend, we enable one another's nerves.

© Paul J. Sampson