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Pique'n'yer interest

He of the sky: Ignorant man legally operates small aircraft

Before the Wright Brothers flew experimental aircraft and NASA launched glorified canisters into space, before John Diefenbaker nixed development of the Avro Arrow and Jazz started charging obnoxious prices for disgusting sandwiches, before, in short, there was anything resembling a flight industry, there were kites — Chinese kites, to be precise.

They were built and tethered to the Great Wall in centuries long gone, and miscreants of a criminal persuasion were leashed to these things and then set aloft. Such affairs unraveled without the lionizing context of today’s extreme sports culture, and so one can imagine that the experience produced much in fear, but little in fun.

While that balance is reversed, taking flight instructions from Sea to Sky Air — based out of Squamish’s Brackendale Airport — is still sort of scary.

Peter Balis is the company’s chief flight instructor, and he also flies tourists on sightseeing excursions and research types on charter sorties. While not huge in marketed presence, Sea to Sky Air plays an interesting and special role in the district’s tourism agenda.

In Squamish, Balis is known as Mama Pete. If you see him walking down the street, you shout “Mama Pete!” in one of those under-your-bad-ass-breath voices common in hip-hop. He’ll say “Word!” in a high pitched yelp, common nowhere else. It’s hard to say how these things come about.

But they are fitting. While Mama Pete is in no obvious way transgendered, he does put off a warm and maternal vibe. It’s a necessary communication given that I’m about to fly a 1975 Cessna four-seater with no more cockpit experience than a brief ground lesson — and vague memories of old war footage depicting Japanese pilots hopped up on speed as they resign themselves to a kamikaze climax.

But Mama Pete exudes the sort of calm achieved after logging 1,200 flight hours. It’s strange and foreign to me, this calm, but compelling in its wisdom, which I take as infinite.

“You gotta make this plane your bitch,” he says, all nonchalant. “But you also have to respect it.”

Mama knows, child. Mama knows.

And if you’re going to try this, there’s a bunch of stuff you should know, too. For example, you should know how much fuel you have. You can use the gauges in the plane to arrive at that conclusion, or, as is sometimes done by hard tickets like Mama Pete, you can dip a wooden peg into the mixture.

You should also know about the plane’s controls. Mama Pete has a complete set of the same controls in the seat beside you, and he’ll take over if you have a panic attack.

There’s a stem type thing sticking out of the control panel, and it looks like those old pull-switches your grandfather used to fire up the high beams of his Pontiac 6000. On the ground, that little stick gets you cruising to take-off speed.

But to take off, you need to get down the tarmac, which requires steering. You do that with foot petals: On the ground, they control wheel direction; in the air, they operate the rudder.

Finally, there are the control sticks. Pull them towards you to get the nose pointing skyward; push them in to level out, or dive down. When it comes to leveling out the nose, there’s a trim dial next your knee that corresponds to flaps on the tail; you use those flaps to help hold the nose at a certain attitude, thus saving your arm muscles from considerable exhaustion. To roll into turns, you simultaneously lift the nose and turn the sticks in your desired direction.

This is kind of weird: You don’t really know what you’re doing, and, with the plane now completely sideways more than a thousand feet in the air, the only thing preventing you from an earthly plunge is a seatbelt and a door of suddenly suspect integrity.

Weirder still is how quickly you become comfortable. Consider that, from an evolutionary perspective, you have no business hanging out thousands of feet in the air. It’s for the birds. And yet, trusting your life to a floating piece of explosive machinery isn’t half as difficult as lending money at the bar. The truth is, while flying is nothing short of fantastic, it’s still more reliable than many friendships. And you have friends, don’t you?

Asides from the immense satisfaction that can come with defying evolutionary design, there’s also the intensely humbling experience of looking down on the earth from a soaring perspective. Warren Glacier, Black Tusk, Howe Sound, the Chief, Table Mountain — these and more are corridor landmarks familiar to most making a living off Highway 99. But see them from above, where their full splendour can be easily absorbed, and the enormity of their being becomes almost spiritual. These things, after all, are much older than even the first criminal to meet his death at the bottom of a kite string. They dismantle your ego in a few short seconds, and a sense of planetary insignificance is all that remains.

The good thing about insignificance is how incredibly soothing it is. Like, who really cares if you crash this plane? Or, more precisely, who’ll care 20 years from now? Probably just your mother. Word.