No plane has ever crashed from turbulence.
The Wright Brothers, however, were blatantly unaware of this. They must have feared that with every one of its convulsions, the aircraft would come tumbling down into the earth like every machine that attempted to fly before theirs.
That’s another thing to remember. The Wright Brothers were not the first humans to fly. Getting an aircraft to gain enough velocity to come up off the ground was not the problem. The problem was figuring out how to control it once it got up there.
Fourteen years before the debut of the Wright brothers’ airplane, Sir Hiram Maxim’s aircraft was set to rise from the earth. It weighed three and a half tons, was powered by two 360-horsepower steam engines, and had a 110-foot wingspan. And although early tests demonstrated it had developed enough lift to take off, in doing so, the aircraft pulled up the track on which it was set to fly. Maxim quickly realized his “flying machine” was uncontrollable and abandoned his project as to avoid disaster.
The early pilots who followed Maxim must not have heeded the legend of Icarus. How they managed to forget the story of the man who dreamed of flying and crashed, betrayed by his own ambition. They didn’t forget. Maybe they deliberately chased the dream everyone said would result in self-destruction if only to be able to say they carried out a voyage through the sun.
Were the Wright brothers afraid, the first time their aircraft jolted and rattled, that they had hit their sun? The faith on which the invention of the airplane depended—the raw faith that young pilots had to have that their invention would keep them above ground—seemed far more unlikely than the idea that gravity could be overcome by a machine.
Even now it is an impossible idea, that we can defeat our biology and fly like birds, all of us.
All turbulence is is the “violent or unsteady movement of air or water.” And even though it has been 100 years since the airplane was invented and no plane has ever crashed because of shaking, the man next to me on my first ever plane ride still gripped the armrest of his seat with white knuckles the second the dreaded rocking and rolling of the newly airborne plane began.
As the plane shook, I leaned forward in my seat and stared out of the square window, watching intently as things on the ground became smaller and smaller. Eventually they shrunk so much that I could no longer squeeze the buildings between my fingers. The cars inched forward on the highway like ants. I wished I could tell them that their destination was just around the corner, but they couldn’t see that from where they were.
I wondered, if we weren’t forced to stick it out, would we leave the car stuck in traffic before we even got to our destination? If we had the choice, would passengers get off the plane before the turbulence passed? Maybe it’s good that when we travel the option to halt our expedition comes with a price. Because change never comes free. And it is all too often that we give up on our journeys before we get to where we need to be.
The first time I flew, the plane was to take me to the rest of my life. (Meaning, I was on my way to New Haven where I would be attending college). There had been a lump in my throat all week that I didn’t know how to get rid of: a fear that once I got to Yale I would be unable to keep up with my peers, that I would be forced to go home with my tail between my legs, and that my parents’ sacrifices would have been in vain.
Later I would find out that this lump had a name, and that it was called imposter syndrome.
You see, nobody experiences turbulence like low-income, first-generation students of color at elite institutions. With nobody to warn us about the turbulence that is sure to come as soon as we begin our journey through higher education, we have no way of knowing that people do not die from turmoil.
Thirty-thousand feet above the ground, suspended between time zones and atmospheres, on the way to the place I would call home for the next four years, I had never felt more adrift.
Planes do not float—they accelerate. Airplanes are driven forward by the thrust that comes from a jet engine, a propeller, or a rocket engine. So as it turns out, their aerial journey is not directionless but pointed. And as long as the plane keeps moving forward through the air, pushed by jet engines or propellers, lift keeps being generated and the plane stays above ground.
But I did not want to move forward.
Or rather, I was unsure about what direction to move in. Part of me wanted to go back to California before I was forced to, then at least I could say it was my choice. Part of me was dying to get to Connecticut and start a new chapter of my life. But mostly I wanted to stay on the plane, somewhere in between where I was and where I was going, if only to have some more time to breathe.
I thought, briefly, as I stood near the luggage carousel, about why I was so eager to choose a school like Yale. Ivy League institutions are the products of a national elite, engineered to keep students like me at a disadvantage. They dedicate an incredible amount of resources towards the reproduction of that same elite and benefit from a history rooted in white supremacy. Simply put, Yale is not built for students like me.
And yet, here we come in droves. Getting into exclusive universities is not the problem for low-income minorities. The problem is figuring out how to succeed once we get there. Flourishing at these institutions is, for first-generation students, an act of raw and unfettered faith.
We must defeat our biology, in a way, by teaching our bodies to trust in our ability to stay above ground when we have never seen anyone fly before us.
One of the bravest choices we can make is to believe in our own ambition. Because if we freeze at the baggage claim, our name stays on the suitcase and it will just come around again and again until we pick it up. So we must take charge of our baggage—must come to terms with the implications of being the first in our families to become acquainted with the clouds. Must embrace the possibility of falling. Must become accustomed to the shaking. Must strap ourselves into the pilot’s seat and keep the plane moving forward, if only to keep ourselves afloat. Because we are the children who ache to realize dreams that are not wholly our own. And here we end up—at the terminal of dreamers who cannot wait to fly.
–Alexandra Rocha-Álvarez ’22
The formatting for certain sentences and several parts of this essay is borrowed from the essay “Time and Distance Overcome” by Eula Biss.
