The commuter airliner sits outside the terminal, unworthy of an enclosed boarding dock. You walk outside and climb a set of stairs to board, and once inside, you feel that the cabin is narrow and crowded. Not much light comes in through the smallish windows, and the overhead lights don't quite make up for it. Taxiing for takeoff, you look out and see the wind is now driving sheets of the rain across the pavement. It is the start of a white knuckle flight, the traveler's nightmare.

Well maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. There are a lot of extraneous anxieties that are mixed into the thought "I am scared of flying". The trip to the airport is often unfamiliar, the airport is imposing, and the service from beginning to end is served with a cold smile. Most of us are a bit claustrophobic, and a bit uncomfortable about sitting in a back seat, and we are unfamiliar with all the normal sounds and sensations of flight. Finally, the act of departing or arriving is often emotional in its own right. Lost in this swirl is the fact that the pilots fully expect to fly a career spanning decades and thousands of hours without making any headlines.

There is commercial air travel, and there is flyin', and the two activities are very different. A fellow recently wrote a story in Air and Space Magazine which tried to bridge the formidable gap between these two parts of aviation. He wrote that he enjoys riding in the small commuter airliners because they fly lower. On clear days he can see the landscapes better, and in bad weather he enjoys the cloudscapes that are never far away. He leaves the emotional baggage at the airport and enjoys the flight through a young boy's eyes. Each flight is his rare and special adventure.

I never remembered his name, but I think of him often because he closed his story with a hope that the pilots enjoy the sights as much as he does. He worried that their fantastic views of earth and sky through the front windows might become dulled by their workday grind.

His story voiced the curiosity held by every one who ever wondered what it is like to fly a schedule. Every night that the plane pops up through a Great Lakes overcast into the endless void of an ink- black sky, I wish I could share the thrill. In the daytime the same clouds flirt with you as you climb, erratically growing lighter above until all of a sudden the plane bursts into bright sunshine. Immediately below, the plane's shadow is surrounded full circle by a rainbow cast into the brilliant white cloud tops.

In good weather it is always interesting to put names on the different hills, hollows and hamlets that pass under the wings, and I refer to a DeLorme atlas more than I do an aeronautical chart. In bad weather it is satisfying to listen to the rain on the tin roof and sit awestruck at the web of electronic signals that allow us to navigate through such weather all the way to the runway threshold.

The show can be appreciated at two levels. The child in us can just look out the window at the patterns of lights that spread to the horizon on a velvet black night, or admire the other- worldly cloudscapes that appear on some days. Early mornings offer reverent views of distant mist shrouded hills, the end of the day offers crisp sunsets. Failing anything else of interest, our curiosity leads us to look straight down to see what nature and man have done to shape the land below.

The technophile can marvel at the thought of the engine's turbine blades, faithfully spinning in a veritable hellfire hour after hour, year after year. The radar reaches out with invisible beams and the echoes are translated into a simple picture of where the weather is or isn't. A GPS receiver can take an array of signals from outer space and turn them into a "follow the dotted line" navigation format for the pilot.

Sometimes I wonder what an old- time airmail pilot would think of all the modern gadgetry at the tips of my fingers. Sometimes I wish that I could share the sights with my wife or kids. Sometimes I think of all the people who would have liked to fly but did something else instead. Very frequently I say to myself "what luck to have a job like this"

Even though we usually fly at altitudes of 5,000 to 10,000 feet, fairly low compared to most air commerce, we often find ourselves cruising in blue sky above an undercast. This particular picture was taken as I started down into Jamestown NY on a flight from Cleveland. From this dazzling brightness I descended into a very gray morning.

This picture was taken as dawn colored the sky over northeast Pennsylvania. I passed through a stretch of obviously unstable air which had all sorts of thunderstorm activity. I don't know what made this cloudscpe, but I do know that the picture is right side up, and the colors are a close match to the photo.

Does the fabled "pot of gold" refer to material riches or to the satisfaction of an enjoyable job?