Please help me finish flight school! Stick and Rudder was written 34 years before the world would hear my infant voice cry out from the delivery ward of St Patricks Hospital on a St. Patrick’s day morning. But it was written for ME.

I know because by the time my Vietnam pilot uncle Tom gave me his well-worn copy of the book that set the standards for how airplanes fly and how pilots should fly them, I already knew what it said.

It would tell me how to become myself! Show me how to translate a boyhood of gawking at the skies into actually navigating them.

No matter what the AirForce said.

As a boy, tee ball, football, hamburgers, soccer, and even the budding redhead couldn’t keep my attention away from the gravity-defying things that took to the sky. Pipeline patrols and crop-dusters, purple martins, doves, dragonflies.

If it flew above my head in southern Louisiana, I watched. I learned. I wanted.

When I was 10, I got my first pair of glasses, after getting hit in the head with baseballs. A lot.

So it was cruel irony when, just a few months later, an AirForce recruiter visited my 5th grade classroom. And crushed my lofty childhood aspirations in his hefty hands. His damning refrain rang in my ears for 25 years…

“You gotta have 20/20 vision to fly with us, son.”

Well, not today. Not anymore. I started flight school better than a year ago, paying for each lesson as I can. At $200/hour.

10 hours down! And I am good. Really really good. All those years of watching, visualizing, practicing in my head … turns out that was training!

Getting my basic private pilot’s license requires an investment of $8,000 and 40 hours in the air.

I’ve completed 10 of those hours.
But I've got 30 hours left for basic training, and 40 more for instrument certification.

Which means I’ve got 30 hours left to fly in perfect weather. 70 hours left to be able to fly LIKE A BOSS when it's cloudy.

And honestly, at $200/hour, it’s slow-going. Ten year-old Drew's dreams must come after the bills are paid. After the kids are fed.

But the kids! My daughters look to the sky just like I did. See my longing and ask when daddy will be up there?! And when they can go with me. Which makes me want to get there faster.

To realize a lifelong dream sooner rather than later. That's why I am asking for your help! When you donate to this campaign, you give $1, $5, $10, $20 or more to making that happen.

High Flight
by John Gillespie Magee Jr.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air....

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.

Where never lark, or even eagle flew —

And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

- Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.