I’m right in the middle of doing possibly the coolest thing I’d ever done and the pilot asks me if I’m ready for a stall test. I ask what that is. The pilot just looks over at me and smiles. He begins to tilt the plane upward until the engine started to stall and then flipped off all of the power switches in the plane. The engine noise stopped, the propellers slowed, and I quickly realized my experience was about to change.

We literally dropped backwards out of the sky and nosedived. Plummeting down at full speed with no control, all I could do scream every obscenity my adolescent brain could still remember, at the top of my lungs. The pilot is just laughing. After he’d gotten his fill of my screams and curses, he very calmly proceeded to pull the plane back up, adjust some dials, and even out the descent so that we were gliding down instead of plummeting. He explained to me that what he did was a common safety drill, he had done it a hundred times, and that he was required to know how to land a plane this size without using the engine.

When my heart finally stopped pounding, I knew one thing. I never wanted to be the one screaming curse words when something goes wrong ever again. I never wanted to feel that helpless again. I wanted to be the guy that could sit back and laugh, because he knew what was happening, and what needed to be done.