As my regular readers will know, one of the basic premises of my blog is that a life of faith has many parallels with the sport of flying light aircraft.

I have a subscription to the excellent ‘Pilot‘ Magazine, and I was even priviliged to have had an article of mine published in it some years ago too. In the July, 2025 edition of the magazine, the Editor, Eugenio Facci, published his editorial and, on reading it, it was immediately apparent to me that he ‘gets it’. Not that this is surprising, of course, because I would say many Pilots feel the same, but he described really well the almost-spiritual freedom and indeed life-changing perspective one gets when flying a light aircraft^[1]. I identified with his words so much that I thought, right, that’s one for the blog. Eugenio has kindly given me his enthusiastic permission to use his piece so, without further ado, here it is:

When I was ten, I used to spend a fair amount of time at the local flying club, where my dad was working towards his PPL^[2] – and where I would occasionally fly in the back of a PA-28 ^[3] during his training flights.

One day, one of the club’s pilots asked me if I wanted to fly with him – in a Cessna 152, meaning in the front seat! I was ecstatic! Of course I did: I was ten, obsessed with flying, I (thought I) knew everything about aeroplanes, and the floor of my bedroom was covered with avidly-read aviation magazines.

I said yes, trying to appear absolutely unfazed – I had read somewhere that a good pilot always keeps it cool – and up we went. The Cessna 152 lifted off into the grey October sky. Once level, the moment came: “Do you want to take control?”

It was a very big deal for me. I put my hands on the yoke and looked around, initially just keeping level. Then, a gentle turn to the right. I saw the right aileron move up (what a nerd), the wing getting lower, the world moving. Wow… I was making the world move! What a sense of power, of freedom, of a different existence! The drudgery of normal life seemed so far away; up there in the sky, I felt like I had graduated into an upper echelon of the universe.

The day after, a Monday, I went to school a different person. Life didn’t have the boundaries of before, nor did I. The experience of flying an aircraft had been empowering and (strangely) humbling at the same time. I quietly told my closest friends (I wasn’t sure everybody would really ‘get it’), and those friends saw a different child from just a few days before. Like meditation changes the mind of a zen master, so flying had changed my mind and soul. Most of all, it had given me one of the most precious things in life: confidence, and of the right kind.

This is not something you stumble upon easily. Nowadays, many young people struggle with confidence, and, quite a few studies seem to show that there are rising problems with anxiety and mental health in younger generations – possibly due to the impossibly high standards and constant scrutiny that comes with social media. As it happens, General Aviation^[4] can help with this problem, and various organisations are already very active in that regard. Just to name a few, Youth and Education Support (YES) in England, the Take Off charity in Scotland and, expanding beyond the world of youngsters, Aerobility.

This is great, but the positive social impact of this could be amplified if this confidence-building exercise became a formal tool within the education policy of a country. The opportunity is there; most science topics can be explained in a fun and interesting way by using aviation as an applied example, and many children like aeroplanes – so you would not have to impose a boring topic onto them.

In addition, the big wave of investments that will come with rearming Britain and the Western world is the perfect time to ask ourselves: What kind of youth do we want to bring up? After all, a nation is only as strong as the minds of its citizens, and the UK (like most other countries) does little to train systematically its youngsters in terms of confidence, resilience, and emotional maturity – just to name a few key aspects that flying helps you develop.

Personally, I am very grateful for the confidence, energy and sturdiness that aviation gave me while growing up. I think we owe the younger generations the same opportunities, and possibly better ones.

– Eugenio Facci
Editorial, Pilot Magazine July 2025

Used here with his kind permission.