There. Almost full disclosure. Now I have described two occasions when my poor judgment put me in grave danger. Descending through the cloud layer near Culpeper and feeling my way across the scarcely visible Hudson happened early in my career, a high-risk time for any pilot. A third near-brush with disaster came later, more the result of negligence than poor judgment—if there’s a difference—and fortunately ended without mishap, too. I’ll come to it in Chapter 7. Every close call remains vivid.

By the time I reached 1,000 hours a dozen years after my first flight (ten years of flying, actually, because of two leaves of absence for study and research in Europe), I felt that I had become a reasonably safe and a reasonably sensible pilot. When I stopped flying after fifty years, I estimate that I had made 8,000 landings, give or take a thousand, at more than 450 different airports and landing strips, from Burris Ranch in New Mexico (where the strip doubles as a driveway) to O’Hare International in Chicago, flying some 55 different models of airplanes and gliders, the biggest of the lot capable of holding six people, the smallest accommodating the pilot alone with no passengers. The airports and air strips where I touched down were in 42 states plus Mexico and Canada. Only once did I damage an airplane (actually a glider) on landing.

Another time, I came perilously close to landing a retractable-gear airplane with the gear up—the kind of event that has embarrassed many a pilot. On that occasion, I was just about to land at Washington National Airport (this time with a radio) when, at the last moment, the tower asked me to change to a different runway—probably because a following jet was getting too close. That entailed turning and climbing a few hundred feet before turning again and descending again. I raised the landing gear for the maneuver and was close to touchdown on the revised runway when at last I remembered that the gear was now up. I was saved by a little mental check list that I liked to run through on final approach. It’s called GUMP, and stands for Gas