“Okay, we just had an engine failure,” Martin says.

I strain my ears and lean forward.  My eyes squint a little as I strain to listen.  The engine sounds perfectly normal to me.  So I look over at him with my nose crinkled in question.  ”The engine seems fine to me.”  I’m wondering if I should be panicking for not even noticing we’re about to plummet to our death.  Here I am, just flying along like nothing is wrong.

A long, exasperated breath floods my headset.  ”We’re trying to simulate a failure,” Martin answers.  His voice sounds tense, and I can tell he’s trying not to be annoyed.

The thing is my husband can notice mechanical problems that most women would never even notice.  Heck, maybe most men wouldn’t either.  Three weeks ago, he kept straining to hear this low whistling noise when we driving on the interstate to go grocery shopping in “the big city”.  He swore this awful whistling was coming from the front of the passenger’s side.  Could I hear it?  Why couldn’t I hear it?  I, of course, heard absolutely nothing wrong and wanted to continue to listen to our audiobook.  But I couldn’t.  We pulled over, and there was nothing wrong with the engine or the tire, or anything else.  In fact, we didn’t really have a problem at all.  A piece of tumbleweed was caught above the tire.

So he notices things I don’t.  And maybe I couldn’t hear that, but I sure as heck knew that our engine was still running when we were flying.  I could hear that.

That’s one of the problems with learning to fly with your spouse.

* * *

Another lesson two weeks ago.

The first time I went flying at night, I got the first kiss from my soon-to-be husband.  The last time? Well let’s just say I got the opposite of a kiss.  (I much more prefer the kiss.)  Martin was mad.

I’m sort of liking the pilot’s seat now, which means I need three hours of night flying and ten landings as part of earning my license.  Landing a plane at night is like driving down the highway in the dark, without headlights – scary, confusing, and harder than heck to see.  It’s just another one of those things that experienced pilots make seem so easy.

Come fly with me at night and you will see it is not easy, and any experienced pilot like my husband might freak out just a tad.

But I will keep practicing.  I want those kisses back.

* * *

I’m trying to figure out how to do 45-degree turns better.  They’re the kind of maneuver that could make you revisit your lunch in about five seconds.

The very basic idea is that you have to start in one position – say facing 180 degrees – and make a complete circle until you’re facing 180 degrees again.  Your wings must tip 45 degrees through the entire turn.  So those of you who understand physics (i.e. definitely not me), you can guess where the challenge is.  You have to maintain altitude.  It means I cannot let the plane descend 1,000 feet per minute like it wants to.  I cannot let a 500 feet per minute descent happen.  (You see where the returning lunch comes in, no?)  I practiced these turns over and over on Monday morning.  It takes so much arm strength that now it hurts to stir cookie dough.

You can laugh, but we’re on a crunch.  The pickings in the fridge and freezer are getting slim.  We’re eating a lot of oatmeal because we have a lot of oatmeal.  We’re eating a lot of black beans because… well you get the idea.  We have ONE last bag of chocolate chips – a luxury item you cannot find in Germany.  And if you come over tomorrow, you can share some of these amazing cookies with us.

But I must warn you: come after lunch.