Craig, your post about your family not being into flying inspired me to write an essay. I will post it here but I don't think it will be very helpful to you. All I can really offer is that we too have trouble with our children disliking flying. We have found that to take them one at a time helps a lot. When they both have to share the back together it seems to be too much for them.

But as for me, my poor husband had to put up with me complaining about the plane and his flying for years before I was "absorbed" into the initiate. So how did he get me to like it? Here is my story.

Making Me A Flyer
By Agatha Shilling

What transformed this ground gripping housewife into an aviator? Was it my husband's IFR rating that convinced me? The travel convenience? The freedom? The risk?

What part of my soul was awakened when I fell in love with flight? Did my husband do something to arouse the slumbering flyer within me? Or was he a mere bystander, watching me unfold to an inevitable destiny?

Did I do it because I wanted to join him in his adventures? Because I wanted to merge with him  to become one as the wedding vows say? Or maybe it had nothing at all to do with him. He was incidental, merely a means to get into the air, where flying itself captured and seduced me.

Perhaps I always strode the stride of freedom, as a man with powered machine pierces and conquers the sky's open wilderness, so was I compelled to seek in height, in speed, and in movement that driving pleasure which only boundless freedom brings.

Or is it the risk? Safe as our modern machines are, nevertheless each act of flying is a choice to divide away one's future for a while by making its prerequisite one single act of landing. Can one who loves this be molded out of a former coward? Can this keen appreciation of life be learned, or must it be inborn?

I don't know why I changed. I saw the sky from inside its bowels, perhaps, instead of the usual squashed flat 2D view from the ground. I felt its motion, its life, its violence, its meanness, its monstrosity. I've seen its glory, its astoundingly beautiful flowing spirit. The sky is a breathing eternal thing that once hung over me like a flat painted ceiling until I rose up into it and discovered its dimensional thickness. How can anyone not be awed and beguiled by this? And if they are not, what would trigger the spark?

Why would a wife fly once in fear or boredom, again with uncertainty, and then suddenly find it hopelessly addictive? I don't know what my husband did to light this fire that now burns in my veins. I suspect he did nothing. It had smoldered just below my awareness all my younger years. It had peeked out briefly when I took lessons for a short while back in my college days, for no good reason. There was a clue when I skydived once, for no good reason.

Upon hearing about these incidentals, my husband-to-be decided I would be an adventuresome wife, only to marry me and discover himself stuck with a grumpy fearful old babymaker. Why did this hag mislead him with hints of an exciting side? How disappointing that he must now resign himself to a ball and chain who barely tolerates his mistress.

So what did he do to water the fun-loving seed within this grouch and make it grow into a wife whom wild horses couldn't pull away from aviation? Perhaps he did nothing more than recognize this dormant love from the start, and then had enough patience and faith to endure the childbearing years.

He chose to marry a person who despises crowded highway travel and crowded commercial travel. That she finally eschewed these for the loneliness of private flight is perhaps no surprise after all. He must have recognized a personality who prefers to be packed into a tiny tin can with her lover over any other social circumstance. A person who cannot tread the beaten path with the masses, but rather seeks out the most independent, isolating activity possible. One who fights reliance on others and seeks the challenge of taking her destiny into her own hands. One who loves the paradox of a world that ends two feet in front of her nose but tumbles about three axes within God's infinite ether.

I guess my husband didn't make me a flyer. He saw the potential, and married it.