In grade school, we'd fold a piece of writing paper into a triangular airplane and toss it. If the folds were right, it would soar. For a real airplane, a lot more has to be reckoned with. There's nose attitude when landing. There are weight considerations for take off and landing. There's wind shear.

There's RVSM, which stands for "Reduced Vertical Separation Minima". That's the airspace where only certified RVSM jets are allowed to fly. In a superhighway, we have lanes; separate horizontal passages going in either direction. In flying, the "lanes" are vertical.

There's radar. American G.I.s stationed at forts and air bases equipped with radar had once discovered a new way to cook. While guarding the big dishes, one could put a raw frankfurter in a long wooden stick; hold it up in front of a dish - from a safe distance - and a minute later have nice, thoroughly cooked hot dog. The microwaves emitted from the dish at that close range were powerful enough, although the farther away from the dish they got traveled, the less potent they got.

After landing, the airplane's radar is still needed for navigating through ground traffic, especially in a fog-enshrouded airport. But, pilots have to turn off their radar when approaching the terminal, or all ground personnel within thirty feet of their nose cones could be in danger.

There are sensors on the skin of an aircraft that measure the flow of air around it; and from that flow, figure out how thin the air is - and, thus, sense the aircraft's altitude. If the aircraft happens to be covered with an extra coat of paint, these sensors need to be reset, since the extra paint will affect the airflow around the craft.

The most effective feature on the airplane is the alert pilot.

I once asked a pilot if he flew an airplane by "feel" as much as by vision and instruments. He told me that today's jets have something called a booster, which is similar to power steering in a car, making it easier for the pilot to steer the airplane. There is also something called the "Arthur Q", which gives an artificial "give and take" feel to steering, so that the pilot is ever mindful of the force of the air that his plane is flying through.

We talked about the B-17s from World War II; big bombers used by the Allies to attack the Axis. According to Stephen Ambrose's book, Citizen Soldiers, Axis Sally used to broadcast on Berlin radio to the Allied Forces in England. She used to advise the pilots, "You won't need your parachutes tonight boys! There's going to be so much flak in the air, you can walk down to earth."

Piloting a B-17 while getting shot at was so nerve-racking, Army Air Corps doctors used to prescribe whiskey to the pilots during their off-hours as a way to ease the stress. This was because tranquilizers took too long to leave a pilot's system. The whiskey system seemed to work well, until the Women's Christian Temperance Union heard about it and put pressure on the War Department to put a stop to it.

I asked him whether those B-17s had boosters and Arthur Qs. He told me no and proceeded to explain how a man could control a craft so large. It wasn't like in the movies. The steering apparatus was a metal sling that the pilot fitted his forearm into. My friend held his right out horizontally in front of him, elbow-to-wrist, to demonstrate, and then grabbed his right wrist with his left hand and explained that a pilot had to almost throw his whole body into steering the B-17.

The lifestyle of some pilots can be nomadic. For example, there is the pilot job in Moscow, Russia. The American pilot will have thirty days on, then thirty days off. For his thirty days on, he'll be on call, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

He will be paid to fly businessmen all over Russia and Europe. He'll be earning American dollars, tax-free. He'll have an apartment in Moscow, paid for by his employers. When he travels home on his thirty days off, they'll fly him first class.

Why do they fly? Why do they put up with the layovers at out-of the way airports in the middle of nowhere? Why do they put up with the long hours and odd working schedules?

Each pilot will give you a different answer. There are those who treat it like a job and those who treat it like vocation. For the pilots who love what they're doing, I suspect that flying has the same fascination that scuba diving has. You're in your own little world; a quiet, alien one, but one where you are in control. Or maybe it's more like those sensory deprivation tanks, where a person floats - alone with his or her thoughts - in water in a dark room. There may be more truth than poetry in this analogy; air is a liquid.

(Above illustration is a Cessna, done circa 1982, airbursh and watercolor on illustration board.)