Last fall, my roommate Alex worked hard on his senior design project. As an aerospace engineering major, his project was, unsurprisingly, a plane. Made out of styrofoam, measuring at about five feet long with two long wings sticking out the sides, the plane was quite a significant structure. Between my room and Alex’s is a hallway with a little nook to the left, where the plane has lived for the duration of its lifetime. Every day the nook would look a little different; sometimes there were screws all over the place, sometimes a bunch of wires and motors were stuffed into the plane, and sometimes there was paint on the underlying newspaper. Each time I walked upstairs to get to my room, I would see the model plane and how much closer it had gotten to being functional. A big part of me wanted to see it fly firsthand.
The plane never did fly in the fall, though, according to Alex. He and his group had gone out to an open field and tried a couple of times, but he never reported back positive results. Nonetheless, the plane was good enough to earn his group an A on the assignment. However, as the semester ended and winter began, the plane still lived right next to our rooms. Both Alex and I were disappointed it never took flight.
In early February, my day started like any other. I finally rolled out of bed and opened up my heavy eyes, wishing I had gone to sleep two hours earlier the night before. I meandered down one flight of stairs, used the restroom, and walked back up. My routine had become rather monotonous in the winter, but at least it was easy to go to class. A mere 10 minutes after waking up, I had 25 zoom boxes on my computer screen, half of them with cameras on if it was a good day.
After English class, I reflected once again on how dull my life was becoming. Most of my time was spent either at my desk, or five feet to the left, in my bed. My room was a mess as well, a surefire sign I was losing motivation. Clothes from the day before were strewn across the floor because I didn’t find it in me to bend my knees and grab them. Socks were laying mere millimeters from my laundry basket because I shot them, missed, and neglected to pick them back up. Why did my bed look like something out of Sharknado? It was clear that I, like many of my peers, was in a bit of a rut.
Opening my door and probing out into the hallway, I looked to my left and laid my eyes on the plane. Even though the project was over last semester, Alex had still been working on it from time to time. It now had a new addition: a winged helmet, painted on to the front of the nose, with the unmistakable colors of maize and blue. It looked ready for action.
I knocked on Alex’s door and barked, “Hey, when are we gonna fly this thing?” This question had become an inside joke, as I wasn’t part of the project at all and had been asking him the same thing for nearly three months. This time, though, it was apparently ready to fly.
He opened the door and replied, “Whenever you’re ready.”
A few hours later we made the short trek to the IM Building and headed around back, where the track is. As usual, there were around a dozen people running on the track–with no idea what they were about to witness. Inside the oval, a group of guys were tossing a football around, sending the pigskin flying high into the air with each throw.
Alex and I strolled up looking out of place. He held a large styrofoam plane in his hands, and I had a bulky controller in mine. His signature “Michigan Aerospace” sweatshirt was a pretty good indicator of what was going on, though. I was giddy like a kid on Christmas, waiting to play with new toys. In this case, though, my friend had built the toy, and we both knew there was a good chance that it didn’t work. However, I had a large enough emotional stock in this plane that I had to be there to see it happen.
We paused for a second at the edge of the track, waiting for a couple runners to pass by as they shot us curious glances. Then, we found our way to the grass in the middle. We gave ourselves some distance from the football players, and put our stuff down. Alex examined the surface we were dealing with, pleasantly surprised at how dry the earth was below us. “Definitely not as flat as I’d like,” he judged, “but at least it’s dry.”
Indeed, it was miraculous how dry and beautiful of a day it was. The typical Michigan weather, single digit temperature with some kind of precipitation on the ground and in the air, had all come to a halt. If only for one day, it was gorgeous outside, giving us optimism that we could see this plane flying in front of a blue sky.
This was the most excited I’d been for anything in a while. It was such a sharp contrast to my usual 4-wall routine: get out of bed, take two steps to my desk, work all day, spend an hour or two watching TV and then get back in bed again. Today, I was out in the wild, in the open air, unsure of what was about to happen next. Maybe this plane could knock out the monotony and pessimism that was currently swarming my life.
Alex popped open his laptop and the screen displayed some kind of terminal for managing the plane. It looked more complicated than an actual plane’s flight system, but he gracefully navigated through a couple menus and told me to give him the controller. I handed it over and he methodically pressed all the buttons and levers, testing them with the laptop. After a few minutes, he was ready to try it out, and told me to get my phone out and record.
Attempt number one went horribly. Alex lined the plane up, pointing it where he wanted
it to launch, and pretty simply hit the gas. He took the left joystick on the controller and slammed it forward, sending the plane in motion. The plane, much louder than I anticipated, quickly gathered some looks from the surrounding audience. Unfortunately, there was no show to be watched, not yet. The plane stumbled its way a few feet forward, took a hard right turn, and let its right wing dig into the ground a bit, stopping it from moving any more. Hey, at least it moved, I thought.
Alex walked towards the plane and examined the result. I thought the plane must be unbalanced, causing it to tip over to the right. Alex agreed. He reviewed the video evidence from my phone and said we should just try it again.
So, Alex put the plane back in the same spot, ready for trial two. He gunned the engine, and unsurprisingly, we saw the same result as the first time. Another failure with no real sign that it was getting better. I was beginning to plan for the worst in my own head. Of course this story was going to have a bad ending, I thought. That’s just my luck. Hope is the most powerful thing for somebody feeling down, and I was beginning to lose hope.
After another few attempts with more or less the same exact result, I was ready to call it quits. Trying the same thing and expecting different results is the definition of insanity, from what I knew. I was already pretty down on my luck at that point, I didn’t need to be insane, too. But, this was Alex’s senior design project, and he had gone above and beyond to try to make this thing work. He wasn’t done yet. In fact, after watching some YouTube videos, he came to a new conclusion.
The ground wasn’t flat enough to be a real runway for the plane. If it was going to fly, it needed to take off from midair. We needed to throw the plane in the air, and hope that it could generate enough lift to turn itself upwards before it hit the ground. It was the only way.
I’m not a religious person but after hearing that explanation, it seemed like an act of God was the only way that this plane was going to fly. The previous half a dozen attempts showed no signs of hope, and now we were relying on Alex’s arm strength to launch the plane. The worst part: we had one shot. Alex was going to throw this thing as high and as hard as he could, hoping to give it a chance to fly. If it was unsuccessful, it would come crashing down to earth.
I aimed my phone’s camera at Alex, then panned to the right. The football players had stopped playing for a while but they were still talking to each other about 30 yards away from us. I like to think they were sticking around for our grand finale. The track had emptied out a bit as it was starting to get dark, and the only sound in the world was the piercing buzz of the plane’s motor. I turned the camera back to Alex as he readied himself for the launch.
He shuffled a couple steps forward and threw it with all his might. Everything turned to slow motion as the plane gained a bit of altitude from the throw. For a brief moment, the plane was heading for the stars. If for just a second, the plane was flying.
Unfortunately, the motors could not outpower gravity, and the nose of the plane quickly turned downwards. Within two seconds of the throw, the plane nose dived into the ground, losing a good piece of its tail and part of a wing upon landing.
Later that night at home, we put the remnants of the plane back between our rooms, both of us knowing that was the last chance the plane had to fly. I wasn’t disappointed at all though, I realized. I thought I needed the plane to fly for me to be happy with it, but I was smiling the whole day regardless. The thing I was rooting for failed miserably, multiple times over, but that was okay. I got to spend the day with hope; hope that the plane might fly, hope that a pandemic would stop ruining the world soon, hope that more hope would be on its way soon.
Before I went to sleep that night I rewatched the video of the nose dive. The video was extremely funny; a small, goofy looking kid chucks a five foot styrofoam plane into the air, and it almost immediately comes crashing down. It could be a viral meme format. But, if you pause it at just the right time, the plane is still looking upwards, shooting for the stars. At that moment, you don’t know how the video ends. Maybe it all comes crashing down, but maybe the plane realizes its potential and flies into the stratosphere. I paused the video right there and took a screenshot. In reality, it may have been a “moments before disaster” screenshot, but that picture represented a turning point. That picture represented a brighter future.
I turned my phone off without watching the rest of the video. I rolled over onto my left side and closed my eyes, ready to drift off into a pleasant sleep. Tomorrow was another ordinary day, but I had a big choice to make. I was the plane, looking to get to the stars. Was I going to keep crashing, or was I going to fly?
Brian Shields | February 10th, 2021 | Ann Arbor, Michigan