Tommaso Cruciani Personal Statement
As I sit here writing, we break through the overcast cloud-tops and I look out the window of seat 11B at the Rolls Royce RB211-535 High Bypass Ratio Turbofan engine on my left. The thought strikes me that most modern airline travelers are quite clueless about the wonders of human kind's innovation. Rated at 43,700 pounds of thrust each, the engines propel the Boeing 757-200, with a wingspan of nearly 138 feet, at a cruise speed of 800kph. I look back into the cabin and my neighbor is in his socks, sipping apple juice and carefully opening his peanut bag, while "The Clash of the Titans" is on the onboard entertainment system. The outside temperature of -50 degrees Celsius, a climb to 38,000 feet of cruising altitude, and an outside pressure unsurvivable by any organism informs my perspective. I can't but stifle a chuckle at how miraculous it is. My fellow passenger looks out the window to see what I'm looking at; I wonder what he sees.
Aviation has always been my passion. Even as a child I remember looking skyward, scanning between the scattered clouds for signs of any flying entity - bird or plane. This obsession has never faltered and has been for me the greatest motivation to persevere resolutely. From the first grade onwards, my favorite question to ask my friends was what they wanted to be when they grew up and I have always been proud of being among the lucky few to have an early, honest answer. Eventually, adults started to suspect that this was no fleeting, child's archetypal dream, but a true ambition. To this day, although my interests range more widely and I keep an open mind as to the other life paths that I may end up undertaking with equal passion, my principal answer stays unchanged.
From model airplanes I painted with my father, to driving with him out to the airport fence to watch airplanes landing, and finally my first experience at an air show, my interest kept evolving until my parents finally gave me the opportunity to earn my wings as soon as I turned of legal flying age in Italy. So it was that on a drizzling February day, after months of theoretic ground school and flight training with a truly inspiring 23 year old executive pilot and instructor, I took off on my first solo flight, just 21 days before my seventeenth birthday and under the watchful eye of my mother. One of the defining moments of my life was the realization that, as the wheels left the ground and I forced myself to look to the empty left seat, I had sole command of throwing one ton of steal around the sky and bringing it back to a gentle touchdown on the "piano keys" of runway 34 at Urbe Municipal Airport.
The mystical feeling that pioneers of flight as early as the mythological Icarus must have felt has perhaps diminished with new scientific understanding and the largely automated systems onboard modern airliners. Nevertheless, the feeling of adventure coupled with strict responsibility is still alive in aviation today, driving many young people to invest their lives in becoming aviators. As I write, we have now reached our cruising altitude and I look out the small oval window again at the ocean of cumulus clouds below us, thinking back to the words of Amelia Earhart, who once said "You have never seen a tree until you have seen its shadow from above." To me, this encompasses all of the romance of flight, which I know will never be replaced by enough automation or knowledge. After every long flight, I can't help but take a moment to rest my hand on the fuselage of my tiny Cessna 172 and reflect on what I have just been able to accomplish. "Did I really just safely fly this thing that distance?" is a question pilots are struck with time and time again.
Besides the excitement of flight and the awe at its technical aspects, my favorite facet of the aviation world are the people in it, and the social environment it creates. This environment has taught me to be caring and observant in all aspects of life. A fly-in meeting is a common event, and what always strikes one who goes to them is that despite the number of people and the relative complexity of the activity at hand,