Risk and Reward - The Pain of Loss

 When I was six, maybe seven, I learned that risk does not always announce itself with drama. Sometimes it arrives as news. Quiet. Final. Irreversible.

George Wall was our jungle pilot.

He flew the Cessna 185 that carried us to school when roads dissolved into mud and rivers swallowed bridges. When the jungle closed in and land travel was impossible, George flew. Calm voice. Steady hands. The kind of man you trusted without needing to explain why. In my young mind, he was part of the landscape. As dependable as the airplane itself.

Then one day he did not come back.

The fog along the coast near Limbe had been thick. He turned steeply, trying to locate the runway. The rainforest does not forgive mistakes, and the trees there are older and taller than fear. The aircraft hit them. George was killed.

I did not understand all the details. I understood the result.

My father cried out when the news came. Not quietly. Not with restraint. He sobbed in a way that shook the room. It was one of the very few times I ever saw my father lose control like that. He was a strong man. A steady man. But that day strength broke open and grief poured out.

That image never left me.

Risk had always been part of our lives. Mission aviation. Jungle roads. Weather that made its own rules. But until that moment, risk still felt abstract, like a calculation adults made somewhere above my head. That day I learned the cost side of the equation.

Reward is easy to romanticize. You get to school. You get supplies. You get home safely. Life continues.

Risk is harder to look at once you see what it can take.

I think that was the day I began to understand that courage is not loud. It is not reckless. It is not blind. True courage is the willingness to carry responsibility knowing exactly what can be lost. George knew the risks. My father knew them too. So did every pilot who lifted off in that environment. They flew anyway, not because they were careless, but because others depended on them.

Loss sharpens memory. It teaches respect. It leaves a scar that becomes part of how you weigh decisions for the rest of your life.

I have lived around aircraft my whole life. I have trusted systems, procedures, checklists. I have taught others to respect margins. Somewhere behind all of that training, behind every calm decision under pressure, stands a six year old boy watching his father weep over a pilot who did not come home.

Risk and reward are never equal. Reward is what we hope for. Risk is what we carry.

And sometimes, the lesson does not come from the flight that lands safely, but from the one that never does.

I write

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