Unlearning to Fly: Navigating the Turbulence and Bliss of Growing Up in the Sky
– Learn MoreA young boy will fly. Despite his disqualifying impairment and his father’s whipsawing encouragement and destructions. Despite his father’s addictions to religion and “the family burning flames of alcohol,” Russ Roberts will be an airline pilot. Nothing matters more. He shares this dream with his father, an airplane mechanic and light-plane pilot. But the boy’s dream is threatened by his father’s alcohol abuse and devotion to an autocratic religion.
As he grows up, Roberts immerses himself in the world of pilots and cockpits and hangars. Flying lessons learned, he soaks up every gem of aviation wisdom his father and other pilots impart, earning his pilot’s license before he can drive and, at seventeen, becoming the youngest licensed flight instructor in the U.S. Later, his story flies you from the skies of Alaska to America’s East Coast, and on to Greenland, Iceland, and Europe,
The big dream, the dream of becoming an airline pilot, though, remains elusive. Finally, on a stressful cross-Atlantic flight in a single-engine airplane with a broken compass and iced-over wings, Roberts realizes that further growth, both personal and career, requires pushing aside beliefs he learned in his formative years. He must think for himself, take risks, form his own ideas.
To learn to fly, he must unlearn to fly.
In his memoir, Unlearning to Fly: Navigating the Turbulence and Bliss of Growing Up in the Sky,” Roberts reveals how his steadfast love of airplanes guides him through a tumultuous childhood and empowers him to set the course for his own life. Equally fascinating and poignant, Roberts’ memoir will make you feel the awe of sitting in the cockpit, the wonder of taking flight, and the unbridled joy of achieving goals.
“Nature and mechanical parts do not bear animosity. The sea is never angry. The sky is never brooding… It is not man against nature. Or man against the machine… Any fear is man against self. And maybe, after one burrows down, that’s the way it always is.”
-from Unlearning to Fly: Navigating the Turbulence and Bliss of Growing Up in the Sky