Flying is full of old adages, most of them with at least a touch of dark humor. One of the most famous is: “Takeoffs are optional, but landings are mandatory.”

Inside the hangar, Colton also had all night to think about what he was about to attempt—something any rational observer would consider almost certain suicide.

AT FIRST LIGHT, DURING the blue hour before actual sunrise, Colton pressed the button to raise the hangar’s wide metal door. He unplugged the Tow Buddy from its charger and attached its beetlelike mandibles to the Cessna’s nose wheel. Using the little low-geared electric tug, he slowly rolled the one-ton plane out of its hangar. Once clear of the building, he not only walked the tug back inside the hangar, but put it in the exact spot he’d found it. Colton didn’t plug its charger back in, but that wouldn’t inconvenience Bob Rivers much considering he’d soon have no plane to use it on.

After closing the hangar door behind him, Colton climbed up into the Cessna’s left-hand seat. Like every aviation procedure, whether it’s a pilot’s first Cessna solo or thousandth sortie in a 747, starting a plane is done by checklist. The challenge, at first, is just learning where all the switches and gauges are located. For Colton, though, that wasn’t a problem. He’d spent many hours looking at this dashboard exactingly reproduced on computer simulations. Even the walls of his bedroom, instead of being hung with scantily clad pop stars, displayed posters of airplane cockpits.

He checked that the fuel tank selector, throttle, prop, and mixture were all set to their correct positions. Normally, a pilot then yells “Clear!” out the side window to warn anyone near the prop to move or risk being sliced and diced.