Learning to Fly: How David Gilmour’s flying lessons and a notebook of stolen phrases became Pink Floyd’s most literal song

The key image in “Learning to Fly” — “a white knuckle grip” and “tumbling through the endless spin” — came straight from David Gilmour’s own pilot training. He’d started taking flying lessons in the mid-1980s, partly as a way to clear his head after the band’s legal war with Roger Waters. Gilmour later said the lyrics describe the “terror and exhilaration” of soloing for the first time, and he even fed the song’s demo the actual engine sounds of his Cessna.

But Gilmour didn’t write a word of the final lyrics himself. Anthony Moore, a longtime friend and co-writer on About Face, came to the sessions with a notebook of vivid, broken phrases he’d collected from overheard conversations and magazine articles. One phrase — “a tremor in the heart of the world” — was spotted in a scientific journal about earthquake prediction. Moore would hand Gilmour sheets of these fragments, and the two would arrange them into a vocal line without Gilmour contributing new lines. Bob Ezrin and Jon Carin helped shape the chord progression and production, but the words were entirely Moore’s collage. Gilmour’s contribution was the emotional hook: he knew what the feeling of flying cost.