The Sounds of Freedom
By Steve Johnson
December 26, 2003
steve@supercub.org
If you were running your leaf blower you missed it. If it is winter, and you are behind your snow thrower, it went unnoticed. Your lawnmower, your boom box, or the rhythmic throbbing of a passing car stereo ? caused the small plane flying over your home to go unnoticed. The sound that you have created by clearing away the natural order of events in your yard was louder than the sound of someone answering their own call of freedom.
We are surrounded by sound every day. As a people, when we create sounds ourselves they do not tend to bother us. When others create sound we instead think of it as noise. Even in the small community I live in, it is not uncommon to be awoken at 1am by a throbbing bass beat from a car stereo as it rolls by or a weed eater on an early Saturday morning. It sometimes makes me very crabby; as I am sure it does you.
I?ll be up front. I?m an FAA certified pilot and instructor and I do generate sound when I fly. You cannot hear me over your weed eater, or your leaf blower, lawn mower, and certainly not your Harley. But when you are sitting on your deck, in your back yard, or out in your field, where all is quiet, you will hear me as I pass. I won?t loiter over your home. I won?t fly low enough to be of any danger to you or your family. I am, like you, an American exercising one of the great privileges of this great country we live in.
As pilots we are statistically a small group. Less than one fourth of a percent of our US population has a license to fly an airplane, and an even much smaller number choose to exercise the license. If you factor out a large number of airline only pilots, the number grows even smaller. The dream of a population propelled by air has never been realized, in fact, it is rapidly diminishing.
Tomorrow, you will walk into your office. On your desk will be a package from Federal Express, or UPS, or Airborne. It will not occur to you that the reason that package made it to your desk is that the person who flew it to your city at one point made distant sounds over your home in a small, single engine, aircraft as he or she passed by en route to learning their trade.
Freedom. Privilege. Rights. As a pilot, I sincerely think about these values as I fly over your home or property. I see the world from a perspective that everyone should experience at least once. We live in an incredibly diverse and wondrous country. When the wind is in my favor, my aircraft of choice flies just barely over one hundred miles an hour, roughly one thousand feet above you, yet I can usually see for over thirty miles in all directions. I cannot begin to describe the overwhelming sense of clarity and serenity that comes with this privilege. I feel this every single time I fly.
We are all exercising our freedom. Whether we are riding four-wheelers, Harleys, Hummers, electric cars, Segways, skateboards, yachts, snowboards, SUV?s, bicycles, snowmobiles, or small aircraft. It is our privilege to do so. Instead of enjoying our own privileges and condemning the privileges of others, will it not make us a stronger nation to celebrate the privileges that others choose to enjoy, even if they are not ?our thing?? Our freedoms and our future freedoms depend upon it.
The next time you shut down your lawn mower in time to hear me pass, think of it as one of the many sounds of our freedom.
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