When I planned the scenic flight with the Cessna Pilot Center in Honolulu at the time, Flight School Hawaii, I didn’t put it together that our flight around the island of Oahu would bring us back over Ford Island, the site where the USS Arizona lies at its troubled rest.
On this day, December 7, but 77 years ago now, the ship was sunk at anchor by the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese forces.
On that day in 2008, a brilliantly blue sky in January echoed the waters beneath us as the controller at Honolulu International asked us to hold over the island. With each turn, we circled the graveyard of hundreds of soldiers lost on that morning. The slow hold gave a chance to mourn from above–and to look out over the land, to see the inland pass over which the fighters slung themselves at an unsuspecting air station.
Each time we pass another 7th of December, I remember.
