DorkySon is learning to fly.

I don’t mean in the metaphorical sense that people so often use to describe teenagers – becoming more independent, testing boundaries, working towards personal dreams – although I suppose these things are also true.

I mean that every second Saturday, weather permitting, we drive him to a small aerodrome a few kilometres east of Hobart, where he sits at the controls of a Cessna 172 and learns how to keep it in the air.

Flight has always been part of DorkySon’s life.

There is a photo of him at nine months old – propped in an armchair and grinning at the camera during his first visit to the Continental Lounge at Newark. From the moment his chubby little fingers could stab away at an iPad, he has watched flight review videos on YouTube, often torturing himself with footage of first-class cabins that we will never be able to afford. And when he recently tallied up how many flights he has taken in his short life, it was well over 100. From tiny Loganair Saabs in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, to the A380 that took us from Sydney to Dallas on what was at the time the world’s longest flight – it’s fair to say he is no stranger to air travel.

Over the last couple of years, that interest has intensified. DorkyDad and I found ourselves driving to the airport and back on weekends so he could take photos of planes. Eventually he started an Instagram page to share them, and then came a dedicated planespotting blog.

But flying a plane himself… well that is obviously a whole new thing.

The desire kicked in at the start of 2021, when we took a family trip down to the spectacular South West National Park – part of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. Squeezed into a 9-seater Britten Norman Islander, DorkySon sat up front beside the pilot as we flew down over the rugged coastline, and back over the mountains.

It was an incredible full day experience of boat rides, walking, storytelling, and scenery. We heard – although we did not see – some endangered orange-bellied parrots, who themselves are sometimes transported down to Melaleuca by plane, as part of a critically important breeding program.

But when we got home it was clearly the flight itself that had made the biggest impression.

“That was cool,” DorkySon said. “I might want to be a pilot one day.”

Coming from a climate campaigning background, flying would never have been my first choice for DorkySon’s hobby, let alone his career. But at the same time, I grew up on a small Scottish island that relies on lifeline flights for everything from food deliveries to medical evacuations. I now live on another small island where flights are essential: for freight, for fighting bushfires, for transporting life-saving nuclear medicine, and for carrying scientific researchers and their equipment to remote areas. There are nuances to the debate around aviation emissions that are often overlooked – and that ensure I will certainly never stand in the way of DorkySon’s ambitions.

For Christmas the following year, we got him a 40-minute Learn to Fly taster experience. It would provide the opportunity to try out the pilot experience for real – the controls in his hands, the ATC chatter in his ear. We figured it would push him one way the other; either cementing the ambition or scaring it away entirely.

DorkyDad and I sat in a grassy area outside the aerodrome, our necks burning in the hot Tasmanian sun. We watched as he was briefed, first standing at a large map on the wall, then with a walkabout and an inspection of the aircraft itself. He climbed in alongside the instructor, and with a gentle roar of the Cessna’s single engine, they taxied to the runway.

For the next forty minutes, he was gone.

The moment he stepped out of the plane and walked towards us, we knew that our instincts had been right. We looked at each other and smiled wryly. We’d better find a shadier spot to sit, because this would not be the last lesson.

That was almost eighteen months ago. I have lost count of how many lessons he has taken, but his logbook tells me that he now around 20 flight hours, and has spent at least double that at home with his nose buried in a theory book.

I suspect that even though he is young to be doing this – he only turned 15 in March, which is the age you can legally fly solo, and it’s a year beyond that before you can apply for the first level of licence in Australia – there are some advantages to learning in your early teens.

DorkySon knows he is starting from a position of no knowledge. He is used to learning, and has no embarrassment about asking questions – about asking to be shown something again if it doesn’t make sense the first time.

I have sat in the aerodrome reception as other, older students have come in for a Learn to Fly experience, wondering aloud if the glider lesson they took 35 years ago will be of use. I have questioned if perhaps it is more dangerous to know a little and think you know a lot than it is to know nothing at all.

What I do know for certain is that the progress he has made in the last eighteen months has been entirely his own effort. Unlike the school essays he occasionally asks for help with, flight theory is something that is beyond me. I cannot even explain the terms – do not know the difference between an aileron and a rudder, can’t define the angle of attack, will never be able to talk you through the procedure for an engine failure after takeoff.

That means that we need to place enormous amounts of trust in other people. Not just in DorkySon, but in every single staff member of the flight training company he is learning with. We trust the owner to maintain his fleet; the mechanics and engineers to be diligent and thorough; the instructors to know what our son is capable of, and what he needs more practice with.

And we do. We trust those people, and all the checklists and systems that guide them, to keep DorkySon safe. When we have told our friends and family that he is learning to fly, the reactions have ranged from admiration to horror. But there seems to be a universal expectation that we should be terrified about the whole thing.

We are not. I am much less nervous about him taking flying lessons than I will be when he starts to take driving lessons.

That’s not to say there haven’t been moments that have raised my eyebrows. When he comes home from a lesson and tells me about the emergency procedures they have practised – stalls, flapless landings, engine failures in the circuit. Or when I’m tracking his flight online and notice just how close he is to a large passenger plane landing at the adjacent airport. It would be strange not to feel a flutter.

But would any of that be enough to stop him doing something he so clearly loves? Of course not.

What we have realised since DorkySon started flying is that it’s an interest that runs in our families – it just skipped a generation. His paternal grandfather died before he was born. But in the 1940s, he was a flight instructor in the US Army Air Corps. We still have copies of the flight logs from when he was learning himself, line after line completed in beautiful cursive handwriting, and we have laughed long and loud at the fact he went from his first ever lesson to his first solo flight in less than a fortnight.

On my side of the family, there is a great uncle who flew a Sopwith Pup with the British Army’s Royal Flying Corps during the First World War. On one occasion he clambered out of the cockpit to try and free a jammed gun, launching the plane into a dive from which it could only just be recovered.

I don’t know if DorkySon will follow in the footsteps of those courageous men and pursue a career as a pilot. If he does, I don’t know what that will look like – whether he will end up flying across the Pacific for an international carrier, providing vital services with Australia’s Royal Flying Doctor Service, or simply shuttling bushwalkers around Tasmania.

But what I do know is that already – eighteen months in – flight training is the best thing he has ever done. It has helped him become more confident, more organised, and a better communicator. Judging by the look on his face every time he steps out of the cockpit, it is exhausting, challenging and deeply exhilarating. Whatever choices he makes in future, I will have no regrets about the time and money spent on helping him soar.