Airplanes have been good to me in recent weeks.

First, I was entertained and educated by “The Wright Brothers,” historian David McCollough’s intriguing story of how men learned to fly. A few days later, I boarded a descendant of the brothers’ invention and safely took a round trip to Kentucky.

Despite those pleasant experiences, I’m not a big fan of flying.

My antipathy isn’t based on fear. I know air travel is safe, much safer than traveling by automobile. Traveling by air is, in fact, probably the mode of travel least likely to kill you. Fatalities, especially on American airlines, are rare. Except for the 2001 attacks, can you even remember the last time a scheduled American flight crashed? I sure can’t, and I often read four newspapers a day.

I used to get a bit nervous during the last half hour or so of a flight when the pilot slows down to make his descent, because it always takes a few seconds for my digestive organs to slow down to the plane’s new airspeed, creating a certain queasy sensation in said organs. I used to wonder how the plane stayed in the air when it suddenly felt like it was standing still, but not any more.

That queasy feeling is one reason I don’t like to fly, though, because it takes my mind back to the very first time I traveled by air. It was back in the 60s when old Frontier Airlines served the good citizens of Wyoming with a fleet of Convair turboprops.

One weekend in January, my permanent roommate and traveling companion was to be part of her sister’s wedding, an opportunity she didn’t want to miss. We were living in Evanston then, where you might trip over the Utah state line if you aren’t careful where you walk, while the wedding was to be celebrated about a dozen miles from Nebraska, at least 450 miles away. Given the distance and the time of the wedding, we decided to try relying on wings rather than tires to make the trip in order to get home in time to get a little sleep before we were expected in our classrooms Monday morning.

It’s hard to believe today, but such a choice was possible a half century ago, although with certain limitations. Frontier didn’t land in Evanston, for one thing, and the alternating strips of winter wheat and fallow ground were unsuitable for use as landing strips in Goshen County.

We could, however, catch a plane 100 miles away in Rock Springs that would land in Riverton on its way to Billings. In Riverton, we would board a plane bound for Denver with a stop in Cheyenne, where Karen’s other sister lived and only a little over an hour from the wedding site by car. As it happened, Christine’s husband, Bill, was working in Rock Springs that week, and would be on the plane with us.

Our trip went smoothly for a while. We had plenty of time to drive to Rock Springs after school on Friday, and even had enough time to stop at Little America for some supper. The plane even left on time.

But, then Wyoming reminded us that it was January. A winter storm beat us to Riverton, and a howling wind turned the flight somewhat bumpy, causing the stewardess — flight attendant to you who don’t remember the Convair 580 — to look for handholds to avoid falling as she made her way up and down the aisle. Worse, the turbulence awakened a personal problem that had plagued me during my younger years, motion sickness. My 23-year-old stomach suddenly regressed to when it was 12 years old, and I deposited a Little America Reuben sandwich in a small bag provided just for that purpose.

Even though the airport in Riverton was clearly visible from the air, gusty winds and a slippery runway dictated that the plane continue, without landing, to Billings, where we spent the night in a nice Holiday Inn at Frontier’s expense. Very early the next morning, we reported back to the airport, where Frontier, still unable to land in Riverton, Casper or even Cheyenne, finally deposited us at the old Denver airport, whereupon Bill called upon Hertz to get us to the church on time.

The return flight was much nicer, except for a problem in Denver that delayed our flight several hours. The delay meant landing in Rock Springs around midnight, where we discovered that Interstate 80 had turned into a hockey rink in a wind tunnel, making the 100 miles home longer than usual. Once there we slipped between sheets so cold it actually hurt to touch them. We got just enough sleep to get us through Monday classes.

I have to admit that I was pretty apprehensive about boarding that Convair back in 1968, which may be why two decades elapsed before we boarded another airliner, this time to visit Washington, D.C.  

Since then, though, I have learned that flying is nothing to fear, and I board airliners without apprehension, despite other factors that make air travel unpleasant for me. Even so, the experience of that first flight often comes back to me when I’m about to board a plane.

That’s why I never eat a Reuben on my way to the airport.