About three blocks down from the AeroThrust monstrosity is a small shop called Plane World, which bills itself "the world's best store for the aviation enthusiast." Peering through the window, I can't imagine the world's best anything being found along this goddamned miserable highway, unless maybe it's the chance to get run over or deafened by a mufflerless Peterbilt. But I'm lured inside by the display cases of die-cast models, books, videos and postcards.

Ivan Hoyos is the owner, a half-Cuban, half-Spaniard who opened the place about six months ago. Curious about his background and clientele, I decide to play journalist and ask if he'll do a short interview. (For this I need some fast credibility. What to do? So I snag a recent copy of "Airways" magazine from one of the shelves and flip it open to an article I wrote about the Timbuktu airport. "Listen, Ivan, I'm Patrick Smith and I wrote this piece here, and I was wondering...")

Hoyos is grateful to talk and suggests we sit in first class. Literally. The centerpiece of his store is a scavenged pair of seats from an Eastern Airlines L-1011. They are a hideous brown dappled with orange and yellow, a testament to their early-70s vintage. They are also for sale at $550.

"I plan to triple the price," Hoyos explains, "if it turns out they are from the wreckage of flight 401." What he's talking about is the infamous Everglades crash in December 1972. Parts of the airplane were pulled from the swamps and stored for years at MIA, and Hoyos thinks these seats might have been among them.

I ask him about the store. Why are many people in love not with flying per se, but with the airlines themselves? "The airline industry is culture," he says. "From the fashion statements of the uniforms to the beauty of the airplanes. But it's much more colorful, more faceted than most other businesses. Glamorous, even today."

He says he does about half his business as mail order. His biggest overall seller? "Anything Eastern." By that he means Eastern Airlines. A shelf across from us is covered with neatly arranged souvenir first-class cups and tumblers, all marked with the old Eastern trademark, a winking blue and white oval. This is a Miami thing, maybe, as Eastern had a huge South Florida presence before being dismantled in the early 1990s by Frank Lorenzo.

"Miami Springs!" Hoyos corrects me, making sure I'm aware of our exact location and its meaning. Apparently the locus of Eastern culture is precisely here and not a zip code further. "But remember," he continues, "for a time Eastern was the largest airline in the free world." I hadn't heard that one in a while: free world. For airplane buffs this is a quaint reference, a way of discounting Aeroflot, the once giant carrier of the Soviet Union.

What's conspicuously missing from the merchandise, however, is any sort of Pan Am memorabilia. They too were a big player at Miami. Hoyos tells me he avoids selling anything Pan Am "out of respect" for something called the Pan Am Aware store. This is a small establishment on the other side of the airport, a sort of shrine to the Pan Am memory run by an octogenarian former employee.

Hoyos motions toward his collection of books. "These are bibles to some people." One of his books is entirely about how to locate and visit crashed and abandoned airplanes all over the world. Airliner Hulks. Armed with this volume, a reader can track down the forsaken remains of a Lockheed Constellation in the jungles of Haiti or visit the rows of retired jets mothballed in the Arizona desert.

When I bring it up, Hoyos bristles at the expression "airliner geek," preferring the term "fanatic" instead. "My customers are normal people," he insists, a tad defensively. "And not just airline workers. I get pilots, mechanics and ticket agents, but I also get doctors and lawyers and bank tellers." With that, two teenagers come in and he immediately begins a discussion with them in Spanish. The words I pick out are "Fokker" and "AeroPeru."

"One thing for sure," Hoyos proclaims with a pointed finger. "About 95 percent of my clientele is male." This isn't surprising, really, but he makes no mention of the woman whose order he was ringing up when I first walked in.

"We have our conventions too. Each year Miami holds a national, and we get about 200 people from around the country, buying and trading. A couple of years ago we had the international, with more than 500 hobbyists from all over the world."

I'm silently scrutinizing Hoyos as he speaks, wondering if I'll catch a glimpse of myself. Is there something, anything, perhaps even a physical trait, that we fanatics all share? Is there a glimmer in the eye, some mysterious praxis, a secret handshake? He's got the look of a Latin soccer player, hardly a techie or a nerd. As for me in my ratty Tevas and an old pair of shorts, I'm disheveled, sunburned and unshowered. It strikes me that Hoyos might have a hard time believing I'm a pilot, a pseudo-journalist, or for that matter a sane human being.

I'm rather uncertain if my little interview is going to expose any provocative gristle, assuming there is any, about the mind of an airplane lover. And suddenly I think of an old Raymond Carver poem, a favorite of mine, about the life of the famous highwire daredevil Karl Wallenda.

When you were little, the wind tailed you...
when you bowed to the Emperor Haile Selassie

I don't think any pilots have ever bowed before emperors -- even Lindbergh. Maybe there's a high-minded sexiness to balancing on a tightrope that you don't find in aviation -- much the way Cirque du Soleil draws its share of upscale patrons while, say, an air show is left for the bubbas of suburbia. Certainly there are no poems about a guy's devotion to collecting cups and saucers from jetliners. But who knows, maybe Ivan Hoyos can win me a PEN prize, or Ken Burns will buy the rights to a 10-part series about his store.

I make a few notes and pick casually at the brown cloth of my chair. I'm now uncomfortable with the thought of this being an actual reclamation from the Everglades disaster. I try to imagine what it would have been like for some unfortunate passenger on this same cushion in 1972, catapulted into the wet, jet-fuel-soaked darkness. Hoyos, meanwhile, is doing his best to further envenom the karma:

"We had a cargo plane crash a few years ago. A DC-8 went down at 72nd Avenue. The smoke was everywhere. You can see where they laid new pavement." And in a hangar across the street, it turns out, a worker was crushed to death when he was caught in the leading-edge slat of a Boeing 727.

I stand. But not wanting to wear out my welcome, I purchase a 7-inch die-cast model of an Air India 747 for $28. Plane World has several shelves of these small metal models, lined up no different than a display of Corgis or Matchboxes in a toy store. There are several makers of these -- companies like Gemini Jets and Dragon and Atlantic Models. They're painted in excruciatingly accurate detail, right down to the windshield wipers, and buyers look not only for favorite liveries but also for specific registration numbers of actual planes they may have once flown or worked on. My Air India jet is registered VT-ESO. It's the Khajuraho. (No offense to Hoyos' boast of "world's best," but the most spectacular collection of these things is probably a place called World of Wings at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam.)

Also for sale at Plane World are three large boxes of postcards. Back in the day, the airlines used to publish thousands of cards featuring glossy photographs of their planes. There are those of us who collect these things, and there are Web sites (who would have guessed) devoted to the selling and bartering of them. The first I ever owned was an Avianca 747. Today I still have about 500, though I'd have hundreds more if I hadn't thrown them away during high school, when my soul was on temporary loan from Boeing to the gods of punk rock. Thumbing through the boxes the way I once thumbed through used 45s in record shops (Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Misfits), I'm touched to see someone has immortalized the likes of a Royal Air Maroc 737 and a Ukrainian Tupolev.

Just after I leave, I'm stopped by a squad car at the corner of 36th and Lavilla Drive. One of Miami Springs' finest wants to know why I'm casing around near the airport with a notebook. I tell her my name is Karl Wallenda and I'm researching an article on highwire daredevils. Doubtless she wonders what publication would be at such a loss for material as to send this strange-looking writer along this diesel-sooted edge of highway.

Back at the Holiday Inn Express, I catch Richard and Marty returning from their adventures in the simulator. Marty looks as if he's just crawled out of a crash. "How'd it go?" I ask him. He gives me a twisted grimace and a wavering thumbs-up.

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