Polly+Anna - Chapter 01 - by Polly+Anna (1500 words) Uncle Mike (1/30/20)
Uncle Mike, like many interesting people was complex. An American expatriate living in Belize he loved this country that Anna and I grew up in. But he also had strong feelings for "The States" as he called them. Most of those feelings were positive, but not all of them. Having served in the U.S. Air Force he had seen how the intersection of idealism, human nature, patriotism, ignorance and politics interacted with sometimes bizarre results.
While I write about him looking down our shirts as we flew his airplane, which he did not really disguise doing. And the fact that he obviously enjoyed watching both of us walk around nearly naked. Weather permitting - which it usually did, in his back yard wearing little more than four postage stamp sized pieces of fabric and some matching colored string... He always looked after us, kept us safe and gave us good advice.
Part of that was wanting us to maximize our future opportunities. When Mike left the Air Force he looked at flying jobs in the states. He had a lot of college and completed ROTC, but not his BA. Most employers would have given him credit for his military flying time, and he basically filled out an FAA form to obtain an Air Transport Pilot's License. But he found different opportunities here more to his liking.
He had run a charter boat service and a bar on the caye, then he ran a hotel and a flight service in the north. That was before he got into the business of facilitating meetings between those who wanted to do things and those who could help them get it done. Basically, Uncle Mike knew everybody and had made himself a trusted go-between. Someone who could generally get most things done for most people.
It was a whirlwind year learning to fly. Looking back on it we were in a rush to get it over. Isn't that a part of being young, the tremendous impatience? We wanted to get on with our lives. But that year, it was tremendous fun as well. Milestones fell with amazing frequency. Mike made us do everything 20 times before he was satisfied. "Do it the right way or don't do it at all."
We started out with two weeks of ground school that included maybe 10 hours in the Cessna. Two weeks later he let us actually fly it without him. By week six we had taken and passed our test. We were impatiently waiting for our Private Pilot's Licenses to arrive. At the half year mark, we started flying at night. We never flew the 172 at night without Mike, "an extra set of eyes," he said.