What I know about airplanes you could squeeze between carry-on bags in the overhead compartment.

They go up and, if all goes well, stay up until the movie's over, then come down, if all goes well, softly.

But I know something about flying. How you feel when there's upward thrust and good wind behind. Like when my daughter, 3 at the time, took my face in her hands as I read her a story and said, "You are the king of daddies."

Austin McManamy knows about flying AND airplanes, even about crashing. He flew a big Sunderland Flying Boat water-plane in the Second World War and, after, he flew Cessnas and ultralights, crashed one but wasn't hurt too badly. He can't fly anymore but his daughters got him up in a plane at the Brantford Flying Club in January when he turned 90.

Paula Yule is Austin's daughter, one of his 11 children. She read a column I wrote recently about Dorothy and Mollie, friends for 91 years. (They're 95; met when they were 4.)

Then Paula sent this email: "Just read your story on Dorothy and Mollie's friendship and thought I might ask …. We lost our mother last year at 89 and my father lives in Dundas, St. Joe's Villa. He just turned 90 and would love company. He doesn't really have interest in the activities so I asked what he'd like. He said, simply, 'I would love to sit and talk about flying. Anything to do with flying.' Any ideas?"

I knew one way to start the ball rolling. I could talk to him. My dad was the navigator on a bomber in the war.

So I did. You would've too.

• "I was 18 when I joined the air force. I told my mother, 'I can't take dad anymore.' He was always running me down. I just wanted to fly. It was calling me."

• Austin had a great, crazy flight instructor who'd "take us up to 5,000 feet and say, 'Take your hands off the controls, feet off the rudder, let go, see what happens.' He taught you to make the plane do what you want it to."

• Austin flew Tiger Moths, Piper Cubs, gliders, and others, but best was the huge four-engine Sunderland (could land and take off on water) that he captained in the war, harassing submarines in the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans.

"Though I was youngest in the crew, I was captain. I guess I showed moxie. One time patrolling we found an oil slick and the wake of a submarine that had just shot down one of our planes. We dropped 500-pound depth charges."

They didn't sink it but damaged its hull and sent it limping away.

"In my dreams at night," says Austin, "I'm on a Sunderland."

Chasing that submarine.

• Austin, a fan of Hamilton's warplane heritage museum, explained to me how to land in the ocean, with swelling breakers. How you fly into the wind and catch the curl, or something like that. Don't trust me to do it if we're ever in that situation.

• He recounted how his ultralight went down over the Everglades and he crash-landed in a swamp. He showed me the clipping from a Fort Myers newspaper.

The worst of it, he says, were the fire ants on the tree stump where he sat to catch his breath.

• He told me he'd sometimes fly his kids up 10,000 feet when they had whooping cough. A doctor had told him that was a remedy.

The whole time — and there was so much more — Paula and her sister Donna Biggar sat beside us, listened and smiled, contributing, basking in their dad's happy surrender to the moment. We were all flying a bit.

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Donna, at one point, sang out the family roster — Mom, Dad, John, Gerri, Tim, Mary, Peter, Paula, Kevin, Donna, Julie, Brian, Michele.

We laughed to hear it.

Anyone out there who could talk/fly with Austin? He'd love it. So would you. Let me know.