When I was picked to fly the X-1, it was my duty to fly it, and I did.
In 1994, to motivate me to complete my pilot's license, my good friend, Gregg Maryniak, gave me Charles Lindbergh's autobiography of his solo flight across the Atlantic.
As a child, I had the opportunity to meet the captain onboard a British Airways flight. It was so exciting to see the cockpit and controls. I was in awe of the captain, and he stamped my log book, which I still have to this day.
I hadn't realized quite how extraordinary Charles Lindbergh's achievement was in flying the Atlantic alone. He had never flown over open water before, but he flew straight to Dingle Bay in Ireland and then on to Paris, exactly as planned.
I got into college, and a gentleman gave me a ride in a plane, and he flipped it upside down so we're inverted flying, like it was nothing, and from that moment forward, I fell in love with it. I said, 'I've got to learn this; I've got to do this.'
The life of an aviator seemed to me ideal. It involved skill. It brought adventure. It made use of the latest developments of science. Mechanical engineers were fettered to factories and drafting boards while pilots have the freedom of wind with the expanse of sky. There were times in an aeroplane when it seemed I had escaped mortality to look down on earth like a God.
Well, the odds must be against anybody being able to fly around the world in a balloon on the first attempt. All of us who are attempting to go around the world in balloons are effectively flying in experimental craft because these craft cannot be tested.
It had never gotten old for him, flying. Never gone boring. Every engine start was a new adventure, guiding the spirit of a lovely machine back into life; every takeoff blending his spirit with its own to do what's never been done in history, to lift away from the ground and fly.
If you go back to the early days of aviation, the guys designing it built it, and then they got in it and flew it. I mean, who does that anymore?
The first movie I worked was called 'The Spirit of St. Louis.' It was the story of Charles Lindberg's life.
Early in the 1990s, I flew alone in a dandelion-yellow, single-engine, 180-horsepower Piper Cherokee from Westchester County Airport in New York westward to the Rocky Mountains, landing and refuelling a good many times in middle-sized cities and towns along the way.
I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty.
To be absolutely alone for the first time in the cockpit of a plane hundreds of feet above the ground is an experience never to be forgotten.
