All that accuracy doesn't mean the film is perfect. The best Disney films hit us deep in our emotional cores—dealing with loss or separation from a parent, rejection, loss of childhood security—or require a hero's journey of internal emotional growth on the part of the main character. In Planes, there is no such primal emotional tension, and Dusty doesn't really have to learn anything or grow internally in order to prevail. It is simply a story about about a plane who, as Dusty says, wants to prove he can be more than he was built for.

On the other hand, what this film does best—and that no other aviation film has done quite as well—is present planes and flying not as they are, but as kids imagine them to be. To a four-year-old, an airplane is a magical machine that can do anything. When kids point up at airplanes overhead or stretch their arms out and run down hills, pretending they can fly, they're not envisioning airspeed instruments and flight-management systems. They're envisioning freedom, possibility, and a limitless horizon. After all, if an airplane can defy gravity, anything is possible. Who cares how?

One of the reasons many pilots are drawn to flying, in fact, is that the act of soaring above the earth, even while paying attention to airspeed instruments, reconnects them again with that feeling of possibility; with the idea that, as aviation pioneer Beryl Markham famously wrote, "no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it."

Because of that, I think the film will speak strongly to kids. Will it inspire them to become pilots? I suppose it might. The day after the film's premiere at EAA's AirVenture (for an audience of more than 12,000), I came across a young boy named Nate, kicking a ball around with his father in an area of the show where pilots were camping with their airplanes. Nate was a very proud four years old, and his father said they'd driven up to the show from Chicago in order to see the movie. When we asked Nate if the ball was his favorite toy, he shook his head. He ran into a tent, and came out holding a small "Dusty" airplane, which he then contentedly zoomed and soared to places only his imagination could see.

It's possible that one day, Nate will take those dreams into the sky, himself. Or perhaps, like Klay Hall, he will find himself soaring with another passion. I don't think it's all that important whether Nate grows up to fly airplanes, as long as he grows up retaining his belief in all the possibilities and freedom and life that flight represents. Can a movie like Planes help reinforce that belief? I hope so. In real life, planes and flying have a remarkable way of helping people remember the importance of notions like dreams, possibilities, and grabbing hold of life with two hands. If Planes, the movie, is able to mirror reality in even that one way, it would be accuracy enough.