Flying is difficult. I thought it would be about five times harder than driving a car, but it’s far more difficult than that. People think of cars as moving in two dimensions and airplanes in three, but that’s not the case: Friction keeps cars from sliding sideways, so most driving is only one-dimensional (along a non-Euclidean line). Even if you’re drifting, there’s plenty of friction unless you hit a patch of ice.

Boaters have a better chance of understanding the difficulty of flight because they’ve tried to sail or motor to a pier in a crosswind, aiming for a fixed point with thrust along one line, drifting from the wind along some other line, maybe drifting along a third line because of a current or tide, and rotating because the centers of mass, water resistance, and wind resistance are all in different places. Flying is more like that, with the added complication of being up in the air in defiance of gravity. And weather. That’s a topic for entire books.

I had imagined that most of flying was “pointing” the aircraft, but it’s more about maintaining a pitch attitude that gives the necessary speed and lift, understanding the effects of the weather, not getting lost, controlling the energy produced by the powerplant, dealing with the sometimes baffling gyroscopic effects, and managing the total potential and kinetic energy of a thousand pounds of steel and aluminum so that when you do get back to the ground, you ease from three dimensions back to one without hurting anything. Even birds are a pain because they are the armadillos of the air, just waiting to get whacked. The difference between armadillos and birds is that armadillos rarely require you to file paperwork with the NTSB.

Flying is a fantastic learning experience. I’ll probably have my first solo in a few weeks, working literally without a net for the first time. I’m looking forward to it.