John had never flown before.

When he was a kid he would lay in the cool grass near his home and watch the birds effortlessly sail between tree and power line and back again. And he loved to blow on dandelions and watch the feathery seeds aimlessly scatter as they floated through the air across his backyard. Still, he never quite had the daring to leave the ground and take flight himself.

And he must be the only aeronautical engineer to have never flown, nor experienced the exhilarating speed and mighty heights of one of his own creations. Irony was not lost on him.

His colleagues ribbed him frequently. He even heard them calling him Dr. Dodo behind his back. But John didn’t mind really; he identified with the long extinct, flightless bird, that had the capacity and possibly the knowledge to fly, but lost the instinct to try.

But today, he sat in his uncomfortable seat inside a narrow metal tube with smallish wings waiting to burst into the sky, was the day.

Today, he would fly to a friend’s urgent need.