Flying is Freedom! I'm not as fortunate as my daughter Deniz, because she flew from Istanbul to the Far East while she was still a tiny embryo in her mother's womb; in fact, she even made a few obligatory trans-Atlantic flights. And she has continued to fly since birth. At a year and a half now, my daughter has more flights to her name than years. As for me, on hot summer evenings in Siirt when I was five years old I used to gaze up at the clear azure sky and daydream about the destinations of those airplanes that soared overhead leaving a white trail in their wake. My experience of flying began with the birds whose flight I have followed in the sky ever since the age of five, and I grew up reading and listening to the stories of Leonardo, Hezarfen and the Mongolfier Brothers. I first tasted the pleasure of flying in the years when I was just starting out in my profession, on a flight from Istanbul to Diyarbakir on a DC-9, which was regarded as one of the most modern aircraft of its time. Instead of a two-day bus trip or a three-day journey by train, I was gliding like a bird through the sky's endless blue over the vast lands of Anatolia, and it took less than two hours.