. The men who have boarded the plane pull the goggles on top of their caps down over their eyes and the planes take off one after the other. The hands of the men-whether it's Robert Mitchum or Gary Cooper is impossible to tell-fiddle now with the hundreds of controls on the instrument panel in front of them. Exchanges take place, like, "Tower, was the left engine serviced?", "Roger", "We're at an altitude of I-don't-know-how-many feet".
The film ends, like everything else. We return home through the narrow cobbled streets, each one of us a Gary Cooper or a Robert Mitchum on the return, making like pilots pulling the throttle all the way out for liftoff. We're flying. We are free.
My generation made its first acquaintance with airplanes through movies like this and the military propeller planes that sometimes passed overhead as we lay flat on our backs in the backyard, gazing up at the sky studying for the history exam. When my son Avsar was five years old we flew as far as Trabzon together.