Among all the pilots I know, one guy stands out. My friend Ron Maness raised on dirt-poor farm in rural North Carolina. It was a hard life: milking cows, feeding pigs, and chopping firewood, and eating squirrel stew. In the summer, he worked the tobacco fields earning 35¢ an hour. He funded college with an ROTC scholarship that included flight training in a tired Cessna 172. Ultimately, he flew the fastest and the newest and finished as a senior captain with a major airline. Despite all the hours he’s logged, he says the essence of flying has never changed. Anything can happen in the cockpit, some of it great; a lot of it bad. But no matter what happens, he says, “just fly the plane.”
