The idea that Rivers owned and flew a small plane had been the subject of much banter on his morning radio show. He’d first had to overcome a deathly “medicate me and wake me when it’s over” fear of flying. Pilot friends and the interminable lines for the ferries heading out to the San Juans during the summer tourist season finally convinced him to reconsider the power of flight. Now he loved it, and especially loved his immaculately kept $175,000 Cessna Skylane.

Colton foraged around the hangar until he found the plane’s key inside a tackle box sitting amid a pile of stored boating gear. He climbed inside the cockpit, powered up the gauges, and saw that the tanks held enough fuel. As he expected, the Skylane’s POH sat inside the plane. The Pilot’s Operating Handbook is a detailed manual specific to every aircraft, and includes step-by-step checklists for prepping, starting, taking off, flying, and landing. It’s the plane’s Rosetta Stone.

Colton had all night to pore over the POH as well as manuals for the avionics, radio, autopilot, and GPS navigation equipment. Out of the small flock of Cessnas roosting at Orcas airport, Rivers’s was the only one outfitted with a Garmin MX200, an $8,000 add-on GPS “situational awareness” system that makes navigating similar to a video game. One of these modern GPS chartplotters linked to a plane’s mechanical and autopilot systems simplifies much of the flier’s in-flight calculations and workload. Click a cursor anywhere on the chart and the computer instantly tells a pilot how to get to his destination. It won’t get a plane up in the air, though.

Airplanes want to fly. Pick the right one, like the Skylane—not too complicated, not too powerful, stable high-wing design, built to operate at relatively slow speeds—then meticulously follow the POH checklists, and there’s a very good chance that even without taking a single flight class, you could get it up in the air. Then, however, you’re royally screwed.