By Jack Elliott

People who fly are often perceived by members of the non-flying public as some kind of strange creatures akin, perhaps, to extraterrestrials. After all, they travel in the heavens. That is difficult for those whose mobility is confined to the road to understand or even to accept.

Fact is, the ranks of pilots include school teachers, secretaries, mechanics, truck drivers, grandmothers, members of the cloth, doctors, legislators, students, retired senior citizens. They include people from every economic strata, people of every ethnic background. The people who travel through the air are no different in demographics than those who naviagate our highways. The difference is in perception.

Even as we approach the centennial of the first powered flight (Dec. 17, 1903), flying is a mystery to most people. There are about 13,500 pilots in New Jersey. Why do these people fly? Many love the challenge of becoming a pilot. Many learn to fly because the speed and mobility of aircraft give their businesses a significant boost. Some fly because it opens up new horizons. They can visit places, often with their families, which they would never be able to get to otherwise.

Tim McSwain of Randolph would check off every one of these reasons -- and one more. "It’s relaxing," he says. "I’m more relaxed in my airplane than I am on Route 280 or 78. I’m not relaxed driving down a highway at 65 miles an hour with cars zooming in the opposite direction passing a couple of feet away.

"In the air you are in control to a greater extent than you are on the road. You don’t have to worry about drunk drivers, aggressive drivers, tailgating truck drivers, or drivers not focused on the road because they’re on the phone."

Tim owns a 1976 Cessna 182. He has two partners. "All of us are family men with children," he says. "I’m not a rich guy. A lot of people spend more for a top-of-the-line SUV than it would cost to buy a good airplane. It costs about 50 cents a mile to operate my airplane. Traveling by airline today is more expensive in most every case. And if you fly with more than one person in the airplane, it still costs 50 cents a mile."

Tim is a senior vice president of U.S. Aviation Underwriters. He has a law degree and practiced for awhile, but he loves being involved in aviation. He holds an instructor’s rating and speaks at safety seminars. He holds an ATP (air transport rating), the highest pilot rating you can get and he has flown as a corporate pilot.

He’s logged more than 8,000 hours. Like most people who fly, and most people in the industry, he is extremely safety conscious.

"Flying is not as easy as driving a car," he points out. "Most people are pretty casual about driving. Flying is not the same."

Recurrent training is mandatory. Private pilots must take biennial checks to keep their licenses. "There are two key items in safe flying," he says. "one is pilot qualifications and two is recurrent training.

"You’re only as safe as your next flight," he tells pilots. "The last one doesn’t count.

"The majority of accidents are the result of pilot error. That’s why good training and recurrent training are important."

"All the public focus on airplanes is on accidents. There are accidents in every form of transportation, but they are not viewed in the same light as aircraft accidents, even if they involve a car running up on the sidewalk or crashing into a restaurant killing people.

"Accidents started when man began using horses for transportation rather than walking. People fell off horses, they were stepped on by horses, horses ran away with them."

"When railroads came along people said, ‘This isn’t safe.’ When the automobile came along it was commonly thought this couldn’t last, the horseless carriage could never replace the horse-drawn carriage that people were used to for centuries.

"People eventually outgrew those perceptions, but after nearly a century of manned flight many simply cannot accept airplanes for what they are -- a fast, efficient means of transportation which serves hundreds of thousands of people every day, and which, like, every other means of transportation, has its accidents."

Tim uses his airplane for both business and pleasure. On one flight this year he had to attend a court hearing in Raleigh, NC, at 1 p.m. "I would have had to leave the house at 6 a.m. if I flew on an airline," he related, "but I flew my airplane. I left my house at 9 a.m. The flight took 2 1/2 hours. The hearing took 45 minutes.

"If I took an airline, I would have had to wait three hours. I drove back to the airport and was home before the airline flight was scheduled to leave. And I landed at Lincoln Park Airport, a lot closer to my home than Newark Airport.

"One Sunday morning last summer my wife, Sue, and I flew to Ocean City. We had brunch on the board walk, took a stroll and flew home. The flight took 45 minutes. Try driving to Ocean City on a summer weekend.

"One weekend, my son, Daniel, 8, and I flew to Wilkes-Barre to visit Steamtown, USA, the railroad museum there. It was a 35-minute flight. It would have taken more than two hours to drive there.

"I also have a daughter, Stephanie, 10. I can’t think of anything that would give me more personal pleasure than to teach my children to fly."