Editorial August 7, 1995 Issue

Overcoming resistance to healing

Mary Metzner Trammell

My dad learned to be a pilot in the early days of flying—in the days of open-cockpit, you're-on-your-own-in-the-sky flying. When I was little, I loved to ask him about his years in the Air National Guard. And especially, about how you could make a plane—something that was obviously so much heavier than air — fly.

Usually, his answers got back to words I didn't understand too well: words like air pressure and wing tilt and parasite drag, and so forth. All those things, I learned, worked together in flying to turn something negative—"air resistance"—into something positive. Somehow, the forward thrust of the plane made the pressure beneath the wings increase, the resistance above the wings decrease, and the plane go up!

What seemed amazing to me, from what little I understood of these simple lessons in aerodynamics, was this: that pilots could use resistance—the very thing you'd think would stop them in their tracks—to catapult themselves upward into the skies. They could manage that resistance, and use it to their advantage. Even if they met a head wind, they could point the nose of the plane upward and keep right on climbing.

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