Flying a jet for a living isn’t always beer and Skittles, and if you doubt me, just turn a few pages and Les Abend and Dick Karl will set you straight. Between maintenance snafus, nasty weather, ATC delays, long days and short nights, sometimes it’s real honest-to-goodness work. This, however, was not one of those days.

It was an early wake-up, sure, but we had only one short leg from Atlanta to Orlando, where we’d be landing shortly after 8 a.m. for a 24-hour layover. It’s my leg, and it was an utterly beautiful, joyously sunny morning to fly. We were only at cruise altitude for a few minutes before ATC cleared us to begin our descent, and as the big Boeing 757’s engines rolled back to idle, I felt an old familiar itch. Clicking the autopilot off a few minutes early for an easy visual landing was not going to quite scratch this particular itch. A day this nice called for low and slow … stick and rudder … tube and fabric.