AIRPLANES   I have always been afraid to fly. That, and it generally makes me feel ill. Yet for some reason, I ended up doing my college internship for a national aviation magazine in Washington DC, and as it turns out, airplanes and aviation are actually pretty interesting. I enjoyed my internship so much, in fact, that after I left Air & Space Smithsonian I visited a few local aviation museums and wrote a few more articles for the magazine as a freelancer. But, I was still afraid of flying.

Then I met Martin, a computer programmer with aspirations towards being an ace-aerobatic pilot. Or a cropduster. He hasn't exactly decided yet. Since then I have been flown up and down the coast in everything from a reasonable sized Piper Arrow (with four seats) to a pee wee sized Lancair kitplane (I am taller than it is), have acted as air-to-air photographer, and have actually done a little piloting of my own, most notably from Chico to San Jose in the now defunct Piper Archer which someone actually crashed in Oregon early last year. Unfortunately, I am still afraid of flying.