“Can I call you Goose?” I ask pilot Frank Fluharty as we walk onto the apron of Bay Bridge Airport on a sunny June afternoon.

“Sure,” he says.

For a second, I feel pretty cool about my Top Gun reference. Then I notice Fluharty is looking at me funny, and I suddenly remember that the emotional climax of Top Gun occurs when Goose—a dependable family guy as opposed to Tom Cruise’s rakish Maverick—gets stuck in their plane and can’t eject, perishing in a most horrible fashion.

“What I meant was that you are Goose in the sense that you’re the co-pilot, and I will be the pilot,” I say. “Not in the sense that you will die during our flight.”

So my attempt at pilot humor crashed and burned—but, hey, I owed Fluharty one. When I met him in the Pilot’s Lounge a few minutes earlier, he put down his magazine and said, “Perfect timing. I just finished reading a book about how to fly.”

Even joking about that made me skittish, but after I learned that the forty-one-year-old Denton, Md., resident has eight years as a pilot under his belt—and, more importantly, is a lieutenant in the Prince George’s County fire and EMS department—I felt a whole lot better.

If God isn’t available to be your co-pilot, as the bumper sticker proclaims, Fluharty is probably the next best thing.

I had expected that Fluharty and I would sit in the Pilot’s Lounge and have a little lesson. You know, an introduction to the principles of aeronautics, a brief history of aviation beginning with the Wright Brothers. But instead Fluharty says, “You ready to fly?” and leads me outside.

Once we climb inside the cockpit of the Piper Archer—a white four-seater with smart blue trim—the education begins. Fluharty takes me through the pre-flight check, orients me to the dashboard instruments, schools me on the take-off procedure, and explains that I will be steering in three axes: pitch, yaw, and roll. Twenty minutes later, we don our headphones and sunglasses, I yell “Clear prop!” and turn on the ignition, and we are taxiing down the runway.

Two things occur to me at this point: One, it’s damn hard to steer a plane with your feet, which is what you have to do when you’re on the ground. And, two, a 2,900-foot runway is not a lengthy piece of road, especially when it dead-ends at the Chesapeake Bay. I push the throttle forward, the plane picks up speed, and when we reach 60 knots (roughly 65 mph), Fluharty’s voice comes through my headphones, saying, “Ease back on the control wheel.” I ease back and the plane’s single front wheel peels away from the tar and the nose lifts.

Suddenly, I see only water. Then, only sky. It’s so much more blue than I’m used to in my normal, grounded life that I giggle. Maybe it’s more of a cackle. As we climb to our flying altitude of 2,000 feet, every so often the plane lifts a few feet and drops in an unnerving hiccup. “Is it supposed to do that?” I ask. “Yes,” Fluharty says. “It’s a small plane in a big sky.” I try not to perseverate on that and instead listen to his instructions about how to make my first left turn.

At this point, you’re probably wondering the same thing my friends did when I told them I’d be embarking on a “discovery flight.” “They’re going to let a schmo like you actually fly the plane? Shouldn’t you have weeks and months of training? Something like driver’s ed for flying planes?”

I put this question to Chris Dancy, media relations director for the Frederick, Md.-based Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, which recently created an easy-to-use national database of flight schools that offer discovery flights on their website (projectpilot.org). Dancy tells me the whole goal of the discovery flight is to prove that schmoes like me can fly a plane. “People think flying is difficult and expensive and that you have to be a math whiz. We wanted to show people it was something anyone could do,” he says. “We hope people will become hooked and decide to go forward with more training.”

For his part, Fluharty had provided a comforting anecdote before we took off. “Two weeks ago, I took a four-year-old girl up,” he said. “My hands were on the controls, but I talked her through the takeoff. You will be flying the plane, but I’ll be there to make sure everything is safe.”

If you’re still stuck on the driver’s ed comparison, consider that there are a lot more people to injure on Route 50 than above it.

After I make the left turn—finishing the rather elaborate flight pattern that all planes at Bay Bridge Airport are required to fly as a result of post-9/11 anti-terrorism measures—we pick up Route 50 and follow it east until we cross the Kent Narrows. Then we turn roughly south, flying over the Eastern Bay and the Wye River toward St. Michaels. Earlier, Fluharty had told me there’s a flight restriction over most of that town because Dick Cheney has a vacation home there, so we can’t drop below 1,500 feet to play paparazzi.

I like to snoop as much as the next nosy reporter, but from the air, Dick Cheney’s crib—and, really, all of the manmade stuff like houses, towns, even the Bay Bridge—is far less interesting than the natural landscape: the serpentine rivers, the Rorschach shapes of land, the scraps of cloud. Keeping St. Michaels on our right, we fly over the Miles River and the Bay Hundred peninsula to meet the Choptank River. We follow it past Oxford and Cambridge before Fluharty says it’s time to turn back north and prepare for landing.

I have to admit that at this point, I’d like him to take over. I’m hot and drained—there’s no A/C in the cockpit—and a bit nauseous, and my arms are stiff from holding the control wheel in a manner known as “the death grip.” But I am Maverick, so I push on.

When we approach the runway, Fluharty directs me to turn perpendicular with it and decrease my speed so the plane can descend. A few minutes later, I make another turn to line us up with the runway, decrease the speed some more and we continue our nice, slow descent.

We’re all set for a smooth landing…except for the fact that, at this point unbeknownst to myself, I begin to pull back on the control wheel, which lifts the plane’s nose. As Fluharty tells me later, “You didn’t want to let the airplane get close to the ground—it’s a pretty common fear.” Fluharty could have landed the plane despite my faux pas, but it would have involved something called a “forward flip.” “Passengers and first time pilots don’t like that maneuver,” he says snidely. “I probably would have been cleaning up the inside of the plane afterward.”

Probably? Definitely.

So, instead, when we’re a half-mile out and still at 500 feet of altitude, Fluharty makes the wise decision to “execute a go-around maneuver.” Up we go again. Blue water. Blue sky. We fly the required flight pattern and circle back, and, when we descend for the second time, I try to relax my grip and give in to gravity a bit more fully. Sure enough, we land smoothly and I use the foot pedals to taxi down the runway, until Fluharty decides I am driving too much like someone who’s had a couple of in-flight cocktails and steers us to our parking space on the apron himself.

As we walk away from the Piper Archer, Fluharty asks if flying a plane is something I want to do again. I say, “Sure.” But I already know that, for me, being a pilot is something to do once, something I did because I could. If you ask me, the real thrill of flying is being free to look around and daydream—not being at the controls.

So, the next time I go up in a tiny plane, I want to be the co-pilot. And, yes, you can call me Goose.

Laura Wexler is senior editor of Baltimore Style magazine.