part two: flight risk

|| the bitter//sweet project || chapter two: free//fall

Flyboy

In 2021, my father, ever the Virgo, decided that for his birthday, he wanted to do something that would forever mark that year as a moment of growth, and that I would be doing it with him as a show of support.

He called me first thing in the morning, waking me up from my early morning torpor, telling me that he would be at the house shortly and that we were going somewhere for his birthday. My father is notorious for providing very limited information involving plans, and with it being so early in the morning, I didn’t think much of the odd circumstances.

When he showed up 10 minutes later to pick me up, my older, fear-seeking brother Deron in the passenger seat, I still had no reason to think that I had just stepped into a trap. I didn’t see Deron too often, as he lived in a different state and I had just discovered his existence a few years prior, but family was a staple for birthday celebrations, so his being there failed to set off any alarms for me.

As we start driving, the minutes pass by with the usual chatter until the conversation takes a sudden turn to the spiritual. The type of black family I come from, whenever this type of talk comes up out of nowhere, you know you’re in for some type of lesson. People start speaking in riddles rather than sentences, answering questions with other questions, and words like “intention” and “manifestation” start to be used like “Amen”.

On most days, this would have been enough to trigger my wariness, but I was unaccustomed to facing both my father and Deron in a coordinated argument, so their riddles were working for a while, drawing me further and further into a conclusion I couldn’t see but knew I was quickly being drawn to.

The thin facade of their act began to chip away quickly in a moment as Deron used our conversation around spirituality to smoothly pivot and say, “So today…I guess the word of the day is fear.” A clear record-scratching moment punctuated by my immediate “WHAT?!”

My father had set up his phone in the car to record my reaction when he told me, so I have watched and rewatched the instant my demeanor changed as I realized I’d been had.

  Deron and my father in the front seats continue their coy dance of words, slowly working to their grand reveal, as I squirmed and huffed and cringed in growing dread. Finally, my father announced “Today, we are going skydiving!”

The idea of such a thing was ridiculous to me! That I, a mild acrophobe and one of the more reserved members of my family, would not only be jumping out of a plane into the open air, but that I would do so after being SURPRISED with the information. Had I not been witness to the slow reveal of their plan, had it not been my father and brother, two in a very short list of family members who would concoct something like this, I would have laughed or thought it a joke.

But I had walked across the tripwire and felt its snap: I knew I was cooked.

The first words out of my mouth are “Holy shit, no! I don’t want to.” They are spoken matter-of-factly and with conviction, but marked with an unmistakable tone of resignation. I knew my family, and I knew myself, and they had caught me.

It was not that any of them could force me to jump out of a plane. If I wanted to make that stand, I could make that choice to become an immovable monolith, old and moss-grown as the world changes around me, upon my very shoulders, yet remain unchanged, faded to the background.

That is not who I want to be. There are a great many things in this world that I am afraid of, but greater than most is becoming a person who is controlled by that fear. I know that fear creates most of humanity’s monsters, and I fear becoming monstrous.

So, my saying “Holy shit, no! I don’t want to” was really me beginning the process of preparing my psyche to confront a beast I had not intended to face that day. And I do mean beginning because I emphatically protested the entire way there.

It was about an hour drive out to the hangar, and by the time that we arrived, I had used up all of my thoughts and words, leaving me completely silent aside from obligatory phrases of politeness as we signed papers, donned our harnesses, watched instructional videos, and finally lined up to board the next flight up.

We got to know our instructors, the people whose chests we would be strapped to. This was to make you more comfortable with the person who would be holding your life in their hands. I’m not sure how much this worked for me. My instructor was a kind-faced white man in his late mid-thirties, and though I liked him, finding out that he was a middle school teacher, and that this was in fact not his primary job, and that most of the instructors were simply enthusiasts who couldn’t get enough, didn’t inspire the most confidence in me.

About three flights had gone up and come back down since we had arrived, and the last two groups had been talking about how windy it was and the possibility of delaying flights if things got worse. Walking across the small strip of concrete that served as the runway, the chilling cut of wind raising gooseflesh across my body, I tried to convince myself that the professionals had determined it safe enough to avoid us inadvertently committing to mass murder-suicide.

If you are someone who has only ever flown on large commercial flights, let me be the first to tell you that things feel much different on a small plane. I felt the wheels of the plane as an extension of my own legs, the thin metal coating as my epidermis– I could feel the moment my feet left the ground, flying through nothingness, walking on air because Black people always have to find a way to reinvent the trick.

I felt the wind pick up beneath my arms, and it felt just as it had at Howard: hands out, pulled to the sky by a force that feels like fear, yet still too wondrous to cry out against. We shook the entire ascent, shaking and vibrating and climbing and climbing and climbing, my stomach dropping with each pull away from gravity. And then it was time.

As luck would have it, I weighed the least out of the five people jumping, which meant that I would be jumping last. Most people would think that the hardest part would be jumping out of the plane, but it was perhaps the easiest for me.

Jumping is merely an act of faith; it wasn’t the strength to pull the cord or the knowledge of when the right time was. It was merely a choice not to step in the way of life. To lean back, close your eyes, and trust that they will open again on the other side. Jumping was easy for me, but the wait before was purgatory.

Once we reached the desired height, somewhere near the sun, they slid the airplane door open, and a torrent of noise and wind filled the cabin. We all sat in a line on two rows of metal benches, sliding one by one up towards the whistling portal of open sky.

I watched everyone’s panic ritual, all their whispered prayers and panicked glances before they were kidnapped to the stratosphere, and then scooting forward to volunteer next. It was one of the most frightening times in my life.

And then we were there. Standing at the edge and looking down into a map I had flown across numerous times, and now would be falling into. If not for the cold clawing at my skin and stinging my eyes, I might have thought myself to be dreaming–

As a child, I always used to dream about flying through the sky like Superman. I didn’t grow up with television or comics, so I don’t know where I got the idea of flying with my arms and legs stretched out. Maybe it just felt the most like freedom, opening myself to the world without reservation. It’s been many years since I’ve had a dream about flying, but as I got older, I began to have more and more dreams about falling. Different kinds of falling: from the sky, down a hole, in a car off a raised highway. Sometimes I survived, and other times I awoke staring at my hands to make sure I survived the fall.

–then came the count of 3…2…1, and, waking or dreaming, I was falling out of a plane either way. Like the ending of those dreams, my jump starts with blackness. Many moments in life require you to take a leap, but I’d be lying if I said I kept my eyes open every time.

The second thing I noticed was the cold and the plunge. Many moments of skydiving feel like flying, but the beginning is not one of them. I hurtled downwards and felt every moment of it; the drop in my stomach, the cold wrap of air, my own as it rushed from my lungs, trying to breathe, to gasp, forgetting the drop, ignoring the cold because air is precious and I needed to focus on getting just a bit of oxygen in me. In a tempest of need, air was still my biggest priority.

This moment felt long, but in truth only lasted about 15 to 30 seconds. Once we reached terminal velocity, it was as if everything slowed down again. Things just kinda… stabilized. Hurtling towards the earth, falling faster than I ever did in a dream, faster than I would have ever imagined myself surviving, I achieved flight once more.

A little after that, my instructor pulled our cord, and we spent the next ten to fifteen minutes slowly floating back down to earth. We talked as we slowly wound down, staring at the earth the way I am used to staring at stars, and it was sometimes peaceful and sometimes frightening. At times, I was bored, and the entire experience, I was far colder than I was comfortable with. All these thoughts and sensations run through the recesses of my mind as the golden plains’ grass reached up to receive me, muted by the profound sense that I would never see the earth the same way again.

Four years later, in the Spring of 2025, I returned there to Orange Skies Skydiving, this time accompanying my friend Peter for his 26th birthday.

When he had asked me to come, I said, “Of course, man! Just know, I’m absolutely not jumping!” and I meant it. I have never been one to “conquer” a fear. Most times I face it, survive it, and resolve to have the strength to face it again should it rear its head. I had needed to know that I could do it, but in no way did I desire to do it again…mostly.

Orange Skies Skydiving is located an hour out from Denver in Fort Morgan. We drove out there in the early morning, the sun floating freely across the vast blue midwestern sky.

Since reading “Soil” by Camille Dungy, a Colorado professor, botanist, mother, and gardener, I have resolved to take more care to notice the nature that textures my life and surroundings. Driving across the sun’s steady gaze, I opened my eyes to the natural, resilient beauty of the West; plains of dried grass stretching, transformed into sheets of gold under the bright heat of the Spring sun; colorful flowerheads peppered through the landscape like hand-tossed sprinkles on ice cream.

The hangar where the company was located sat amid a languid acres-long gradient of straw-colored plains and prairie grass, giving the planes a wide open area to fly and land in. Dust and arid topsoil blew about in the windy, open-faced hangar, and I tucked into my leather jacket that I was sure to bring after my first experience.

As Peter waited for his turn to suit up and take off, he sat with me, signing waivers, reading documents, and talking through his nerves. When our discussion turned to the different packages they offered for his skydive and their prices:

“Hey Aingkhu, should I go for the 180 package, or do you think it’s worth paying the 290 for the raw footage?” He stared at me, his eyebrows drawn in to let me know he really wanted me to talk him off the ledge of a poor decision.

“I mean, it is a very unique experience, so it’s not the craziest idea to pay $100 more for the raw footage,” I started, making sure to make it sound like I considered the merits of each option. I have always been a frugal person, and knew what option I was already leaning towards.

”But I also don’t think that you would need the raw footage that much. The version they give you is edited to make it more epic anyway, so I think that would probably be better.”

I topped this off with a quick, “but that’s just me,” my classic phrase for avoiding liability for my advice. As Peter waffled back and forth, proclaiming the cons and pros of both out loud as he was lured by each option, it struck me the other reasons that Black people often don’t fly.

Ambushed and mostly reluctant when I went the first time, spending my attentions on hyping myself up to jump out of a plane, it never really occurred to me how much my father had paid for us to have an experience like that. Once more, I found myself grappling with the cost of the flight.

A prime motivator for Peter choosing to skydive for his birthday had to do with him preparing to take another big leap: switching his career goals and pursuing a law degree back at Howard University. One of the videos he later posted was of him walking to board his skydiving plane, captioned “Off to conquering all of my fears!”

While preparing himself for one of the biggest changes he has experienced in life, once more pursuing higher education, this critical space for pursuing freedom, it was critical for him to achieve flight, despite the costs.

Grounding

After Donald Trump achieved reelection in 2025, he immediately set to war against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs and initiatives across America. Some of these programs were critically important to the lives of many, and others were merely performative window dressing, but what is important is that the distinction here means very little because what was under attack was the very idea of a world that was not monolithically heteronormative, patriarchal, imperial, capitalist, and Eurocentric.

It carries with it the implicit belief that only a special initiative or conspiracy could justify the selection of a non-white, non-straight, non-male, because those are the ones who deserve these chances the most. One of the many reactions to this constantly unfolding national American disposition was the attempt by the Air Force to remove the Tuskegee Airmen training videos from their database.

What must it feel like to have been one of the Tuskegee Airmen, disrespected for years for daring to touch the sky, dreading the moment they were forced to return to a world eager to forget them? To become a story of progressive American triumph for as many years as it could stand the taste of them, before being spat into the gutters of history. I imagine it to be something like how it feels to be Charles Page.

Most people are aware of the story of the Wright Brothers, Orville and Wilbur Wright, launching their first airplane flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903. This story is one of the most famous in American aviation history, but much less-known is the tale of Charles Page, an African-American inventor who had applied for the patent to his invention months earlier: the double-balloon flyable airship.

Charles Page was born, most likely into slavery, in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, in 1864. Barred from education, Page developed his talents as an inventor largely on his own and was skilled in a variety of occupations.

Between the years of 1899 and 1903, Page built a full-scale version of a bi-ballooned flyable airship at his home in Pineville, improving stability, propulsion, and control, advancing airship technology in the United States.

What made his invention unique for his time was its two-balloon design, unlike the Zeppelin airship of the same period. Additionally, the bi-balloon airship’s boat hull included a rudder and a propeller operated by a gas motor to improve the vehicle’s steering and propulsion.

While his patent application was pending, Page sent his creation to be exhibited at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, when it was “mysteriously lost” in transit.

On April 10, 1906, he received his United States Patent #817,422 for his “Air Ship” before the Wright Brothers received U.S. Patent #821,393 for their “Flying Machine” on May 22 of the same year. Despite this, the loss of his prototype devastated Charles Page, and he basically gave up any further attempts at constructing an airship and rejected multiple inquiries and offers to buy his patent.

This is often the legacy of Blackness in America. To contribute to the world, knowing that your name will most likely be erased from your work.

To hope that you would one day be able to achieve enough to transcend your earthly bonds, and to attempt it regardless of what will be left to you beyond that moment. To know that no end can serve as the justification for the means that create it. To live in a perpetual leap of faith. I write knowing that many of the authors that I love, whose writings create pathways for me to find ways to live in my world, were not offered the same appreciation at their time.

Perhaps that’s all that flying ever was– grabbed in fate’s mighty fist and hurled into the careless cosmos, making the best out of a bad situation.

Maybe flight is the decision to mill your arms and kick your legs to tell a story with your body that might save you. That someone might see some wonder in your desperate act, to join in, because it only takes two to start a movement.

Or perhaps flight never existed at all, merely the myth we told after we were dragged through the universe and tumbled over and over and over until you can’t tell down from up, or your smile from your grimace, easy to forget because the world never learned to tell the difference.

Maybe flight was the lie you told yourself to survive, the thread that kept the wind from scattering pieces of you across the earth to be found, excavated, and displayed. Maybe flight is our most beautiful story that keeps us dreaming.

That Black imagination has always been our underground railroad, and that, in the words of Nnedi Okorafor, “creation goes both ways.” That it had to be invented to be achieved, and we had to believe it was achieved to achieve it again.

Reference Page

McCoy, Kelly. Charles Frederick Page, Inventor of the Bi-Ballooned Flyable Airship, 1903 | Blackpast.Org, 3 Feb. 2025, blackpast.org/african-american-history/charles-frederick-page-inventor-of-the-bi-ballooned-flyable-airship-1903/.

[Originally posted June 30th]