o I’m sitting on the end of a runway in nighttime New York at the controls of an Airbus 320. James Paul, our instructor, goes through the basic controls of this advanced passenger aircraft (it must be advanced – the doors stay on in flight). The engines are rumbling – I can feel them spool up through the bottom of my seat. James tells me to just keep it on the runway centerline during takeoff, hold it there until he calls rotate, and then I’ll pull back into a fifteen degree climb out, and then I’m to pull the gear in and the flaps up. Kyle, my co-pilot, is given his own instructions.

I look out the cockpit to all sides. New York gleams. Overhead, the stars twinkle. And I just hope I don’t want to screw this up and kill us all. That would be embarrassing.

“Advance the throttles two clicks forward,” James tells me. Under my sweaty right hand, I feel the clicks: one, two. The plane starts to suck up runway, the lights flashing past at an epileptic-fit-inducting tempo. I can feel the thrust shoving me back into my seat, the sensation of runway racing under spinning wheels. I’m just right of the centerline and am touching the rudder pedals, trying to walk it back to the middle – I want it to be a light touch but I’m so keyed, I’m sawing it. Dammit, just down the line. Just down the line. Just down the…

“Rotate.”

I pull the stick back with my left hand, my right on the throttle. I’m afraid to look down at the instruments, just fixed on the world dropping away. Risk a glance. Ten percent climb. Bump the nose up. Fifteen. I feel it in the pit of my stomach.

I remember James ordering the gear in and the flaps up, and maybe it was actually in that order. I think I heard the gear thump into the wells, heard Kyle confirm they were all in, felt the plane accelerate, that drag gone. And I was flying.

For a moment in my mind I was over Lake Apopka in my little 200-pound ultralight again, throttle full forward, lifting off the step-wave, wafting into the bright Florida sky, tears streaming back from my eyes from the windblast and emotion of the moment.

And now James is calling for a turn to port and I cant it over to fifteen, twenty, thirty degrees. The 320 is a magnificent machine, totally computer controlled and state of the art. You roll it over and let off the stick and it simply stays in that attitude until the fuel runs out. I kept falling back to my Cessna stick time, trying to correct with rudder. To that, the airbus testily tells me to stop it, setting off a couple of warning alarms that Kyle had to shut down. James noted that even at climbout speed, I could tear the rudder clear off it I kept walking it. I stopped kicking the crap out of the 320 and just let it do its thing.

Night over New York City. Kinda.

This simulator is roomy enough for four yet expansive enough to be a world in itself.

So how did I get the captain’s seat of a modern passenger jet? Well, our host (and train buddy) James is an airbus instructor and invited Zach, Kyle and myself to the training facility for a little Friday-night out-of-hours flight time. And this simulator is state of the art. Look, I worked of the C-5 and V-22 projects for GE a quarter century ago. While they were jaw dropping at their time, they are ColecoVision compared to this. We are actually in a roomy cockpit pod standing on hydraulic lifts. If you accelerate, it quietly tips back. If you bank, it does too. And it fools your senses, making it feel like you are actually flying (all three of us admitted to a bit of queasiness at certain times as we rolled the plane into hard sixty-degree banks). At one point, someone said they saw cars moving on the ground. Well, ho ho, I thought, jolly joke. Until in a low bank, I looked down and could see streets with streetlights, and little cars moving along the highways. The cities were faithfully modeled (we flew New York, Las Vegas, San Fransisco and Boston). It takes your breath away.

Bombing across the Upper Bay at 250 mph and 200 feet of elevation, under the disapproving green eyes of Lady Liberty.

After all of us rotated through the pilot’s seat, James showed us how the Airbus could land itself in full socked-in conditions at Boston. With Zach as pilot and myself copilot and a windshield full of mist, James had me enter values into the autopilot regarding various important factors (wind, airport runway, and lots of other data ) and then we started our descent. As we passed the correct point, I dropped the gear. Tha-thump. James called out the increasing flap deployment and Zach stood by on throttles. We couldn’t see anything and suddenly the clouds parted and there was the runway, dead beneath our expectant tires. A moment later, the rubber was thudding into the mist-wet concrete, the plane bounced once (again, we could feel it in the cockpit as the hydraulics mimicked the correct sensations) and Zach hauled the throttle back to the stops as we slowed down to a nice stop. James waved his hands and now it was daytime and clear, and look, we were actually in the middle of the airport.

Zach and I were good enough to land in zero visibility … with a little help from the plane. The terrible weather burned off quickly, it seems.

This is the gate we ended at. Look at the detail. The shadows under the baggage cars actually moves. I’m still in awe of this simulator.

So yes, that was an amazing check ride on a top-level simulator. Even as a writer, I’m at a loss for words in expressing thanks to our kind host for allowing us this privilege, and JetBlue for letting an ultralight pilot fly a multi-ton heavy aircraft. And in case you’d like a simulator like this for yourself, they are cheap at $16 million a pop. Tell them that “Flaps” Raymond sent you.

And the final cool thing? Since James is a rated instructor, I brought along my dusty old logbook and picked up an hour of sim time in it. This is one, literally, for the books!

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