Friday, September 19, 2025

Field note excerpt from research for The Ultraview Effect (forthcoming, May 2026, University of California Press).

​March 7, 2019. Mojave, California.
I was hanging out ahead of my noon interview when I got an email from test pilot “Orville.” He had between 11:30 and 12 noon open for a flight, and could I do that? I said yes. A few minutes later he texted me to be at the pilot’s lounge in 10 minutes. Boom, I was there… We were going to go up in the silver plane.
Orville had reassured me by telling me about a 97 year old lady who had recently gone up and also about a 6’4” man with a walker who weighed 400 pounds and who had also gone up. He had also asked me if I liked roller coasters, saying small plane flight was more like a roller coaster than being in a boat. It was pretty windy and I was expecting a lot of drops and stuff but also felt that I could handle that better than some of his other passengers.
We flew up and it… was very similar to taking off on a larger plane. The sky was blue with some tiny puffy clouds here and there and we soared out over the desert …We went to the far end of our trip and then turned around, which was the most roller coaster part of the whole experience. We then headed back to the airport and slowly lit down.