About Page
This is a true story about chasing my dream to be a pilot.
It starts at an early age and I will take you through some details of my life.
I will go through some details about people who are supposed to love and guide you. Most will try to destroy your dreams to be more.
I will guide you through my perspective of how I learned to fly for free.
The struggles of learning to fly.
How I struggled to get into flight school with no money.
The type of training I got.
The near disaster I averted on a training flight’
And I will talk about my great mentors and friends I had along this journey.
About Page
This is a true story about chasing my dream to be a pilot.
It starts at an early age and I will take you through some details of my life.
I will go through some details about people who are supposed to love and guide you. Most will try to destroy your dreams to be more.
I will guide you through my perspective of how I learned to fly for free.
The struggles of learning to fly.
How I struggled to get into flight school with no money.
The type of training I got.
The near disaster I averted on a training flight’
And I will talk about my great mentors and friends I had along this journey.
                        My Young Experience
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When I was growing up I was always begging my parents to buy little wooden airplanes. You would snap them together and throw them. Later you could get them with rubber bands to wind up the propellers.
 I was a little obsessed with playing with these little planes . I would not be permitted to play with my planes when I started elementary school. When I started the second grade I started to get in real trouble for building paper airplanes and throwing them in class. After a couple trips to the principal office for a paddling. I decided to curtail throwing planes in class. That didn’t stop flying at recess. A lot of my friends were asking me to make planes for them. This was a lot more fun than listening to the teacher. That year in school did not go well for me. The teacher decided I was not mature enough to move up to 3rd grade.
      Lucky for me we moved. With a new school and a great teacher who knew how to work around my attention focused on flying. Mis Underwood engaged my creative side with arts and crafts. The real bonus that year was that we had moved next door to an Air Force training base. I got to see planes take off and land just about every day. They were training in T-38s. You might say I was in heaven. About a year later a plane almost crashed into our house. My mother didn’t think we should live that close to the airfield. We moved about two miles away. I think my mother might have made a mistake when choosing the location. We ended up two miles off the west end of the runway.. LOL This would be the last time we moved until I graduated high school.
     I started to mature a little and settle into a routine. Got more into paying attention in school. Mis Underwood, my new second grade teacher, instilled that if I was going to be a pilot I would need a good education. That does not mean I gave up messing with planes. I started building models of the planes I like. The only drawback, I couldn’t make them fly. When I got old enough I would help my dad work on the weekends to make some money. I saved and bought a model plane that had a small engine. I crashed a few times. By the third plane I had learned how to fly it. That was a costly learning experience. When I was 13 My mother, my grandmother and I were out in front of the house cleaning up the yard when I looked over at the airfield. To my surprise I saw something glowing as bright as the sun, I got everyone's attention. We were amazed at what we were seeing. We watched for a couple of minutes when two T-38s flew right over our house about 300 feet above us. They were flying straight for the glowing object. Â
As they approached the object it looked like it shrunk a little before it shot straight up. In a matter of a couple seconds it was gone. I remember looking over at my mother and saying, that's not one of ours. I was kind of amazed at what I saw and I wonder if that is what I will be flying someday.
     After the UFO experience I would lay on the picnic table in our backyard and watch a lot of different planes fly over to the airbase at night. Some of these objects did not have regular navigation lights and did not make a sound. Now here comes high school. All I was interested in was cars and girls. You had to have a car or truck to get a girlfriend. Thoughts of flying kind of faded in the background. I kind of started hanging around the guys who were building hotrods. I developed a need for something fast to drive. I bought a 69 Firebird formula 400. The motor was blown and I only paid 400 dollars for it. That's all the money I had saved from working after school. My friends and I got it running before summer was over. It still needed a lot of work. By the time I got fixed up I was almost 18. It wasn’t long until the government rolled the drinking age back to 18. I was in the 12th grade. I was lucky I didn't get in trouble with a fast car and alcohol. Did get acquainted with a few girls. I survived high-school without too much trouble. Got a full time job working at a local mobile home plant. My dad was the service manager. I kind of had a little help getting the job. I was assigned to the metal department. We put the rolled metal roofs and metal siding on the houses that rolled down the assembly line. Starting pay $3.60 an hour. After about 3 months I was put peace-rate. I got paid by the house we completed each day, an average of seven houses a day. My pay average $12 each house. That was a lot of money in 1978 for anybody living in the south But these guys I worked with decided to go on strike (Morons). I had no money saved up and no prospects.
Pursuing one’s childhood dreams is universal human experience, and Ken Apperson’s account of his passion for flying, as he shares it in his short book How I Learned To Fly For Free, is part of this common story in the author’s voice.
Apperson takes readers to his childhood when he got fascinated with all things flying as he played with wooden airplanes and this passion became his biggest dream while he lived near an airfield and, as he tells, witnessed a UFO incident as a teenager. In the years to come, he would pursue a career in flying and enrolling in the military for fulfilling this dream.
In the mini-chapters within this memoir of his military career and becoming a pilot, the author shares memories of his training days as well as bits of information about the mechanics of flying. For instance, he shares that learning to fly a helicopter is a lot harder than a plane. And flying wasn’t easy, not to mention the discipline of military training. But he shows readers that to fulfill your dreams, you need to work your way to it.
The author’s tone is positive and has a touch of excitement to it; readers would be able to feel his pride over the achievement of his goal conveyed through the simple and straightforward style of storytelling. There is little to no dialogue in this memoir and the narration suffers from sounding monotonous. But the imagery is fairly developed for a writer who is just beginning his journey in the world of publishing.
With only 16 pages to go through, How I Learned To Fly For Free is categorized as a short story but would actually pass for a memoir that one can finish in a single sitting. The book, as it is available now, is not well-formatted, has no page numbers, and has many typos for such a short work. It could really benefit from another round of more thorough proofing and maybe republished as a chapter in a full-length work. Apperson says at the end that more stories from his life will be coming our way in future.
Regardless of the lack of a developed structure and the work's formatting issues or typos, Apperson’s memoir has the spontaneous, unforced narration that succeeds in conveying the author’s passion. For flying enthusiasts in particular, this makes a good short read that ends with the familiar advice in Apperson’s own voice: never give up on your dreams.