My First Flight with Alia… When the Dream Left the Classroom

On the morning of February 6, 1980, I woke before daylight had fully reached Amman, sensing that this day would be unlike any that had come before it. The sky was heavy with clouds, and winter cold surrounded the city, yet something warmer was awakening within me. A dream that had lived for years in the imagination was about to become real—a dream with engines, a runway, and a voice of its own.

I arrived at Marka Airport two hours before departure. The terminal still held the quiet of early morning, though behind that silence the careful preparations for the day’s flights were already underway. I entered the dispatch office and began reviewing the documents, operational information, and flight plan. I had studied such papers many times during training, but that morning they seemed entirely different. They were no longer part of an exercise that could be corrected after class. They belonged to a real flight carrying real passengers, and every figure now carried responsibility.

That was when I began to understand that aviation does not start at takeoff. It begins much earlier—with a document checked carefully, fuel calculated correctly, weather interpreted accurately, and a small detail that may later determine a major decision. The sky does not recognize good intentions alone. It demands disciplined knowledge and a mind that refuses to let details pass unquestioned.

When we reached the aircraft, I began my first exterior inspection as a trainee flight engineer on the Boeing 727-200. Beside me was my instructor, Flight Engineer Amer Habjouqa, explaining each part with the calm confidence of someone who understood that knowledge is transmitted not only through words, but through the manner in which they are given. We examined the fuselage, wings, landing gear, and engine inlets. I knew their names from textbooks, but now they seemed alive because they were connected to the fate of an actual flight.

The aircraft appeared to me like a great living creature preparing to awaken. Every connection served a purpose, every gauge told a story, and every sound carried a meaning that could not be ignored. What had once been a diagram on a page now stood before me in metal, pipes, systems, and mechanisms working together in a balance as intricate as the human body.

Then I entered the cockpit and took my place before the flight engineer’s panel. The number of switches, gauges, and indicators would have overwhelmed any beginner, yet I felt a strange familiarity, as though I had arrived at a place that had been waiting for me. The panel was not a collection of silent instruments. It was a language I had to learn to hear—the language of fuel, pressure, electricity, air, and engines. It was not enough to observe an indication; I had to understand what it was saying and what any change might mean.

At 7:30 that morning, the aircraft began taxiing toward the runway. The engines rose in power, and I felt that the moment I had waited for was no longer a possibility. When the wheels lifted from the ground at Marka Airport, joy and awe met inside me. I was no longer a passenger looking through a window. I was a member of a crew entrusted with an entire flight.

Above the clouds, the meaning of the sky changed for me. It was no longer merely the home of a dream; it had become a realm of discipline, precision, and teamwork. Every word in the cockpit had its proper time, every procedure had its order, and every crew member understood that his vigilance completed the vigilance of the others. I realized that an aircraft is not operated by individual skill alone, but by mutual trust that turns several people into one coordinated mind.

My instructor observed and guided me without taking away my opportunity to think. That is one of the finest qualities of a true teacher: he does not turn experience into authority that frightens the student, but into reassurance that allows learning to take place. He corrected me calmly, asked before answering, and encouraged me to search for the reason rather than merely memorize the result. From him I learned that aviation training does not shape knowledge alone; it shapes the character that will one day have to use that knowledge under full responsibility.

When we arrived in Cairo, I did not feel that the lesson had ended. The stop at the airport became another chapter of it. I followed the refueling operation, the preparations for departure, and the coordination between the flight crew and ground teams. Every person worked within carefully measured time, and each step depended on the one before it. I saw clearly that a safe flight is not created only by those seated in the cockpit, but by a wide network of people whose names the passengers may never know, though their lives depend upon the quality of their work.

On the return flight, I was calmer, though no less attentive. A first experience does not give a person complete confidence, but it removes the sense of unfamiliarity between him and responsibility. When Amman appeared in the distance and the aircraft began its gradual descent toward Marka Airport, I felt that I was returning to the same place, but I was no longer the same person who had departed that morning.

The aircraft landed safely, the engines were shut down, and my first flight with Alia came to an end. Yet only the flying hours had ended. The deeper journey had just begun within me. Back in the operations room, Amer Habjouqa completed his report, handed it to me with a smile, and said, “Your first flight was excellent—as though you were born to be in this place.”

Those words were more than a compliment to a trainee at the end of his first day. They remained with me because, in a single moment, they gave me a responsibility greater than the happiness I felt. When a teacher sees ability in you, you become obligated to honor that trust and to prove, first to yourself, that an early success is not the end of the road, but a commitment to keep learning.

The flights continued, and my experience expanded gradually. The instrument panel became less mysterious, and I began to understand the aircraft’s sounds and signals more deeply. Yet every flight also taught me that aviation knowledge never reaches a final point. Every weather condition carries a lesson, every crew adds experience, and every airport presents a new circumstance requiring judgment and understanding.

Nearly two months later, on April 4, 1980, I completed my final check flight to Athens with Flight Engineer Bassam Abu Hijleh. It was not simply a test of what I had memorized, but of what I had learned to apply under responsibility. I had to demonstrate that knowledge had moved from memory into behavior, and that I could monitor the systems, follow procedures, and work within the crew with confidence and discipline.

The flight was successful, and I was officially qualified as a flight engineer. It was an important day in my career, but it did not give me the feeling of arrival as much as it gave me the feeling of a new beginning. I was now prepared to carry professional responsibility, yet the dream within me was still looking forward—to the seat where I hoped one day to sit as the pilot commanding the aircraft, rather than only monitoring its systems.

With the passing years, I came to understand that my time as a flight engineer was not merely a stage to be left behind. It was an essential foundation for everything that followed. It taught me to respect the aircraft before attempting to command it, to understand what was happening behind the instruments, and to see the airplane as a complete system rather than simply wings and engines. The person who understands the aircraft from within becomes more humble before it and more aware of the responsibility carried by the one who leads it.

My first flight began on a cloudy morning, yet it opened before me a horizon that remained wide for more than four decades. From the dispatch office at Marka Airport to the flight engineer’s panel, and from Cairo to Athens, the dream was gradually leaving the world of imagination and entering the world of work.

Today, when I return in memory to February 6, 1980, I do not remember that flight merely as the first line in my logbook. I remember it as the day I learned that dreams are not fulfilled simply when we reach them, but when we become capable of carrying their responsibility.

That morning, it was not only a Boeing 727 that lifted from the runway at Marka. A young man also rose with it—a young man who had carried the sky in his imagination and was beginning, for the first time, to understand that reaching it requires more than wings. It requires knowledge, patience, discipline, and a trust that must never be betrayed.