"You can't fly planes! Be more realistic!!"

Those were the words of Stephen Hopson's well-meaning parents.

You see, Stephen was born with a passion for flying, but he was also born profoundly deaf.

When he was just four years old, Stephen would beg his mother to take him to the airport so he could watch the planes take off and land. He would stand at the perimeter fence and watch until the plane went taxing toward the runway. At that point, he would run back to the car and gently place his head its hood.

"That plane would take off and the roar of its engines could be 'heard' through the tremendous vibration I would feel," says Stephen. He describes the vibration as what you would feel if you put your hand on top of a furiously shaking washing machine. "That, of course, always made my day. It made my dream of flying even more vivid and made it easier for me to ignore my parent's well-meaning lectures."

Later, Stephen would construct makeshift villages with flying planes overhead and pretend he was a pilot coming in for a major landing.

When we was old enough to drive, he continued the ritual of taking himself to the airport to watch the planes take off and land.

Sometimes, he would go for a long drive in the country. "After looking around for traffic, I'd swerve the car in the middle of the highway so that the broken white lines would slide beneath the car, and I'd imagine I was a pilot roaring down the runway for takeoff or landing. I'd put my hand on the gear, pretending it was a throttle. Then I'd act like a real pilot by pressing imaginary buttons in the car as if they were lights, switches, dials and other instruments. It made it so real one time I had to pull off and cry."

"That," says Stephen, "is the power of visualization--imagining yourself as doing something and actually feeling as if it were truly real. At times I would be overwhelmed with a sense of 'knowing' that one day I'd take my first flight lesson."

But there are no deaf pilots, right? So Stephen put aside his dream and became a successful stockbroker on Wall Street.

It wasn't until years later, when fate landed him in Michigan, that Stephen's dreams started to become reality.

He had come there to work on a book project, and although that didn't turn out as he had hoped, while there he somehow stumbled onto information about deaf pilots.

"I found that they had been in existence since 1948, much to my utter shock. I had no idea!

"That's when my childhood dreams came roaring back to life in an instant. I was instantly transported back to my childhood fantasies and set out to find a flight instructor to work with me, not knowing how it would pan out."

He found that instructor and went on to become the world's first deaf "instrument rated" pilot.

Though it's easy enough for a deaf pilot to fly on a nice day, it gets tough when there's inclement weather and visibility is poor. It's times like these that you have to rely on only the instrument panel and your communication with the radio tower.

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