Taking Flight
Morning mist clings low across the grass strip at Hilversum. PH-SKC waits there, wings beaded with dew, engine silent. The fields are hushed, punctuated only by the soft rustle of grass and the distant cry of seagulls. Standing beside the plane, I feel that strange mix of calm and electricity, exactly what Wilbur Wright once described: “the sensation is one of perfect peace mingled with an excitement that strains every nerve to the utmost.”
As a kid on the plains of the Midwest, I’d lie on my back in the grass and watch contrails drift across the sky. Those streaks were chalk lines drawn on a blue canvas, and I’d wonder what it might feel like to trace them myself.
My grandfather, Stanley Grimes, looked at the sky differently. In the winter of 1944, crouched behind a .50-caliber gun in Italy, he waited for the faint drone of Messerschmitts—planes he was trained to shoot down. It’s not lost on me that he tried to keep aircraft out of the sky, and here I am trying to put myself in them. Two generations, looking up, but for opposite reasons.
Years later, I earned my Private Pilot License in Vélez-Málaga, Spain. Soloing over the Mediterranean coast was a dream made real: the sea below, whitewashed towns perched on cliffs drifting past, and the surreal “sea of greenhouses” near El Ejido—a patchwork so vast it’s visible from space. For that kid lying in the grass, tracing contrails with his finger, it was proof that dreams can come true.
Why Now
That kid never stopped looking up. And the guy who soloed over the Med didn’t either. This journey is about more than just adding hours and passing exams. It’s for our family—building toward a future and showing my kids what it looks like when you go all in on the thing that won’t let you go.
Flight training is humbling. I remember reading David McCullough’s book about the Wright brothers—how they spent hours just watching birds, scribbling notes on how wings caught the air and tails steadied the body. That same curiosity drives me now. Only instead of birds in Dayton, I’ve got Dutch weather reports that change by the minute, weight-and-balance numbers scribbled on a kneeboard, and the odd sensation of bumping my head against an invisible ceiling when climbing out of a little grass field just miles from one of the busiest airports in Europe.
The radios still trip me up. The Cessna doesn’t like the grass strip, and each landing and turn to base is a reminder that gravity has the final word. But the nerd in me can’t help but love it—the way every checklist, chart, and weather report is another puzzle to solve. It’s the same fascination that still has me poring over history books, maps, and letters from my grandfather’s war. Now it’s transponders, METARs, and glide ratios, printing out charts and obsessing over anything aviation (Jenn has to remind me sometimes that she’s not as equally interested as I am to know the altitude, speed and destination of every single plane flying over us as I religiously check on the FlightRadar24 app).
What This Blog Will Be
This won’t be a pilot’s manual. It’s a logbook in plain English—the challenges, the breakthroughs, the improbable views of the Spanish coastline, the Dutch mornings heavy with mist, and the imagined return to Denver skies. It’s about flying, the journey towards a Commercial Pilot’s license, and hopefully a place where some of those mundane lines in my logbook will take on some color.
And through it all, I keep coming back to Wilbur’s words: “perfect peace mingled with an excitement that strains every nerve to the utmost.” That’s flying. That’s this journey.
