I was worried when the wing fell off. Generally it’s not something you want to see happen to an airplane.

Especially when it’s in the air.

Then the engine cut out, but I was having a hard enough time just getting my vision to align with the spinning to pay much attention to it. Something about the world going round every two seconds takes a bit of getting used to. I started reaching for the emergency door handle, to pop it completely off the airframe so I could get out from the machine. The machine that was starting to shed pieces of fabric from where the wing had been attached to the fuselage, wind roar adding to the general feeling dawning on me that this flight wasn’t going particularly well.

That’s when I first smelled some smoke.

The door wasn’t really popping off into the slipstream despite my having pulled the emergency handle off in my hand. Instead, the strut that had before been mated to the now-gone wing had bounced back from that breakup and had speared the door through the window, preventing it from flying off like it was supposed to and for all I knew entreating it to never leave. The door seemed of two minds, alternately slamming against the fuselage like a kettle drum gone berserk and then flipping off on its strut-hinge and seeming, but not quite, to fly off like it was supposed to.

My brain was doing that time-slowed-down thing you sometimes read about, and I pondered the fact that I smelled smoke, eventually (Years or seconds later) guessing the wing had torn a couple fuel lines in its original quest for freedom, which is why the engine had quit and also where the smell of smoke was coming from.

Meanwhile, my dizzy eyes were noting with a weird calm that I’d lost a thousand feet already and the world kaleidoscoping in front of me was now just three thousand feet or so below. Reaching to my belt I undid the first set of straps to the beat of the door banging again, and then the confusing, rushing, whistling roar of wind as the door finally decided that mating with the strut was not the basis for a healthy long-term relationship and finally flew off on its own. Free to pursue a life of religious fulfillment, I guess.

For some reason I still couldn’t get out of the seat, and it took the world doing a couple turns before I remembered that this, like all aerobatic airplanes, had two seatbelts. My brain wasn’t apparently the steel-jaw, fighter pilot, always prepared, master of every situation I sometimes imagined it to be. I eventually grabbed at the second seatbelt latch, the joystick flipping around the cockpit making it a not-quite-graceful exercise, and finally levered myself out of the airplane and into the sky.

Spreading out my arms and legs, I finally stopped spinning and got some sort of sense of direction again. I saw the one winged Decathlon making some aerobatic maneuvers I’d never even contemplated trying out of the corner of my eye. The Earth was below. Funny, but I’d never skydived before. It felt odd. The wind tore at my eyes, so I wasn’t really in the mood for enjoying the magic of airplane-less flight in any case, and I reached for the chute release and pulled it in one motion.

And suddenly I wasn’t rushing through the air at 100 miles an hour, but floating down at 20 or so. The world had a horizon again. My eyes worked again (After blinking a bit). I looked up and to my left and saw the Decath doing its impossible maneuvers on its own and passing me a couple hundred yards away. I didn’t look away until it hit the ground, suddenly just a big cloud of dust and dirt that settled quickly to show a jumble of steel tubes and fabric. Kind of like a modern art installation. Made by a sociopath with a thing against aviation.

Landing the chute winded me, but after a minute or so I could stand. Legs working, arms working, mind more or less working. I got out of the chute harness and ambled in the direction of the aircraft remains. Had some silly idea I had to secure the airplane’s logbook and documents.

I guess it was shock. I didn’t remember sitting down on the ground, or tripping and falling, or anything, but there I was, flat on my back, coming too as the sun was setting and bathing the horizon in a golden glow. Hours must have passed. I rubbed my face, squinted a bit. Where the airplane had been was only charred steel now, the fabric having all burnt off. Good thing this was desert shrub country. It’d suck to parachute safely out, then be burned to death while unconscious. I vaguely remembered a road that led to the interstate some miles to the South. I got up, looked again at the sun going down so I’d know which way was West, turned to the South and started walking.

And let me tell you, I never thought the world could ever be as beautiful as it looked at that moment.