There is this thing I call, “pilot complex”. I am speaking of the skewed perception of size that creeps into the mindset of a pilot. Pilots that only fly a couple hundred hours per year may not suffer from this disease to the extent that I do. In the last 12 months I spent nearly 900 hours looking at the earth from a perspective that made normal objects look small. A car, for example, looks like a toy when viewed from just 1500′ above the surface. Houses, trains, rivers, roads, and people all look like Playmobile characters and this affects my psyche. Example: This is why pilots make mistakes like this; “Oh ya’, I’ll drop you in Quad Creek and you can walk to the Talkeetna River in 2 hours or less it can’t be more than 4 miles”… 36 hours later the poor kayaker has still not made the destination. This example is totally hypothetical, but it gets the point across. It only takes me a couple of minutes in the plane, so it can’t be that hard to walk. Our perception of distance and size is not just a little off, but is out of calibration by a factor of ten or more. Day to day I live in this false reality of size, and then I am snapped back to reality when I view Mike’s Super Cub against the backdrop of the Chugach mountains. For a split second, my brain acknowledges that I am not big, I am just viewing earth from a distance that makes things look small. It’s a reality check that I enjoy because it encourages me to focus, I am once again, a small ship in a very big ocean.