I can fly, i can fly, I can fly!

On July 18 I had an appointment to join Jeroen in his tiny plane. At first I had given this flight to a friend, but he was too much of a coward to accept this experience, so I took on this challenge myself.

I did not know what to expect. Recently I had discovered that I had no fear of heights, so that was a good thing. But when I told my inner circle what I was about to do, everybody was shitting their pants.

When I arrived at flight school Hilversum, Jeroen showed me his mini airplane. ‘Hang on a sec, I’ll move him’ and he pushed the plane over the ground and rolled a few meters further. It looked like a toy plane to me, but I wasn’t scared. The retard in me found it even more exciting, because it seemed kind of dangerous.

Once i climbed in the plane, we were ready for take-off. When seated I started to sweat like crazy. Not because of the nerves, but it was a good warm summer day and inside it felt like 30 degrees.

In a few seconds we were already up in the air. This toy plane was as heavy as a feather and it was anything but scary. It was beautiful!
We flew from Hilversum to Rotterdam, past my parents’ house and of course went looking for my place. It was really something else to see everything from above and most of the time I did not know where we were exactly. We flew over the Erasmus Bridge and of course the Kuip. I really don’t care about soccer though, but that’s what you do when you’re flying over the city of Rotterdam.

The best part was when I became the pilot myself. It was super exciting, but heavy (and this time it was because of the nerves). It took just a teeny-tiny push against the control stick and the plane just went along. I was afraid that with the smallest push I would tear us into the ground. So I was holding it with all the strength that I had and it felt like a good work out. You don’t need a gym for that?!
While training my arms I also became nauseous. Because of my ego, I made sure Jeroen didn’t notice my nausea, because ‘I could do this!’ I wouldn’t let nausea ruin my flight.

After my nausea passed, Jeroen felt the need to fly steep down a few times. While he was laughing his eyes out, it felt like my stomach was dying. But new experiences are fun, I told myself. So I tried to enjoy it when it was over of course.

But why did I do this you ask? Besides that, it was a gift at first, I always wanted to do it myself. It’s something you don’t do on a daily basis and I believe that new experiences help you grow. After the flight I even thought to myself; shall I get a license?

Also, I do not believe in coincidences. Just zoom in on the picture of my house. You can see that my sister is outside, while she didn’t know that we were flying there. Coincidence?