A Chick in the Cockpit (7 page)

It's simply adhering to the Final Items checklist by making sure your head is out of your ass and to be absolutely certain that you are ready to take control of this enormous piece of thing called Life, and put it into the air.

The Final Item on the checklist is to acknowledge that men and women
are
different. Those pictures prove it. But it's not just the physical, it's the psychological differences, and neither is better or worse. Gloria Steinem had it wrong, but it was a great first step. Martin Luther King was on the right track, but now we need to simply throw away all physical differences and judge someone strictly on “...the content of our character,” not our differences, or even our similarities.

That is the next revolution we should all be looking for. Women have proven themselves physically and psychologically. We need to prove that we are, indeed, different, but that we can do similar tasks in different ways and still get the same positive, or negative, result as a man.

Our mistake as feminists is thinking we should be or think more like men. There is nothing feminine about feminism, and that's where we all got it wrong. We should be acknowledging our strengths and weaknesses, not denying them. Women are more able to understand the big picture, lead holistically, and can nurture the positive out of any situation. We've also learned to use kindness while commanding and still get people to follow orders.

I can say that now, but during my years of flight training and obsessive focus on aviation, I unknowingly found myself pulling away from the world of women. I cringed when a girl in my ground school started painting her fingernails during class and the fumes got so bad we had to stop systems training to open a window. She had been failing her tests and cried when she was reprimanded for painting her fingernails. She was an embarrassment to women trying to make it in this man's world. I was ashamed of her, and somewhere along the way I forgot that this was her individual personality, which really didn't have anything to do with being a woman. She was just a bad student, but she told everyone she was being discriminated against, and I didn't want to be in a category with her. I wanted to be a different version of a woman, so I decided to distance myself from
everything
that I thought represented being feminine. I started to only hang out with the guys, which engineered the loss of my own female identity and support group of friends. I slowly started to forget just how great women are because I spent most of my time blending myself into the world of men.

My Final Item Checklist was complete the moment I removed myself from all things that I thought would make me weak. Years later, as I came crashing down into a pile of ashes, I would come to realize that what I thought was weak was actually the strongest bond on earth.

9
Cleared for Takeoff

1.
Throttle(s) – push forward smoothly

2.
Crosswind – check and controls corrected

3.
Last chance to check your instruments

4.
Yell “Yee Haw!” at rotation

The work and preparation that makes for a safe flight is done on the ground before the magic words “cleared for takeoff” are spoken by the voice of God in the control tower. Before getting into the airplane, you should have already investigated the current weather for the entire route, weight and balance, weather forecast, fuel requirements, destination airport information, icing levels, charts, notams (notice to airmen info), inoperative aircraft components, alternate destinations, etc. So when you are cleared for takeoff, the only items you are concentrating on are those few moments in the danger zone before rotation.

The indicated airspeed that you rotate at depends primarily on how heavy the aircraft is and the outside temperature. There are other factors, like contaminated runway and crosswind, but predominantly it depends on weight. The heavier the aircraft is, the faster and higher the takeoff speed. Typically, you're traveling at around 145 knots (roughly 167 miles per hour) when you pull back on the yoke of a loaded Boeing 727-200 at rotation.

I mentioned V1 (airspeed/velocity) and rotate, so this is a great juncture to mention the anomaly associated with this moment during takeoff. Despite knowing the difference and implications of those airspeed callouts, the reality is that most pilots will try to abort the takeoff if something happens after V1, but before rotation. Countless accident reports grouse that the pilot should have continued the takeoff, but he instead chose to keep the aircraft on the ground, causing the enormous moving momentum of 197,000 pounds to careen off the end of the runway. It's impossible to stop that much moving mass no matter how hard you stomp on the brakes or pull on the thrust reversers. Blame instinct once again. The thought of putting something so large into the air with an unknown malfunction is intuitively unsafe, despite what the performance charts infer. It's hard to stop the momentum, and the thought of departing the surface of the earth with a piece of machinery in trouble overrides training.

Every one of us is going to do something that we know we shouldn't do. We just can't help it. Momentum moves us in a certain direction and it just seems easier to keep traveling in that general direction despite what we've heard to be true. For my own life's accident report, I'm going to blame momentum. In hindsight, I know I should have done it differently but, instead, I kept my life on the ground rather than rotate it into the sky.

On that same fateful day when I found pornography in every orifice an airplane can have, I met the person who would be the reason my life careened off the runway. The irony is that I'm ultimately glad it happened. It's true that if it wasn't for this huge malfunction, I would still be setting those contrails in the sky, but I'm not. I'm here on the ground.

Of course, it begins with, “There was this guy...”

There was this guy named Brad. The first time I saw him, I was in the flight deck looking down the long empty rows of passenger seats. I could see his blue mechanic's uniform as he stood in the middle of the passenger cabin with all the flight attendants gathered around him. I surmised he was telling dirty jokes by the way he tilted his head down and looked at his audience, anticipating their reaction. When he delivered the punch line, the flight attendants blushed and scoffed at his off-color humor, but they still laughed. They walked away chuckling to themselves, and it was nice to have an air of levity because it tends to create collaboration among the entire crew. Happy flight attendants mean happy passengers.

At the time, Brad was a new aircraft mechanic from Colorado, so he worked the night shift, and it was his responsibility to launch the morning departures. Word had spread that the new chick pilot was flying out of Minneapolis, so all the mechanics found time to come up and say hi to the chick working the engineer panel. I thought I had met all the mechanics, but fate saved the best for last.

After the flight attendants had gone back to their duties, Brad had nothing to do. He spied me sitting at the flight engineer's desk in my goofy pilot uniform and clip-on tie. I had just put the menagerie of dirty pictures back into the engineer's desk when a crooked smile spread across his face as he walked into the cockpit to give me some shit.

“
You're
the new flight engineer? Did you know you were a girl? Someone must've forgotten to tell you. Wait, do you really think you know how to do this? Gosh, there are all these funny buttons and switches, and you might break a nail...” he rambled on mischievously while looking directly into my eyes to see how I would react to the jibe.

“Oh, I think I can manage just fine. I actually do know what all these switches do, and look...” I said, holding up my hands, “no fingernails, see?” He accepted my unintended challenge, and gently took my hand into his. He laid my hand on top of his palm and used his other hand to turn it over. He touched what was left of my nervous nails and said, “See, this job
will
break all your nails!” The moment was startling and electrifying. The noise and commotion faded into the background for the moment that he held my hand, which added to the surrealism of the day.

He broke the spell by getting back to business. “So, does the airplane meet Your Majesty's approval? Is the airplane good to go?”

I told him I'd already completed the pre-flight inspection (Omitting the bit about the porn pictures), everything looked good, and we were just waiting for the fuel load.

As he walked away, I shook off the moment by telling myself he was j
ust another man in the mix
. He was charming and arrogant with his cliché mechanic's persona—being macho and hitting on the flight attendants. I would never date a man like that, a skirt chaser who was just out for a good time. I figured he had similar judgments about me, a nerdy girl who didn't know how to be a woman. We both judged a book by its cover, but then again, some of the most fascinating books have bland covers.

Brad and I saw each other on many of my departures out of Minneapolis, and we'd tease each other incessantly about how incompetent the other was. Mechanics and pilots are always at war. Brad and I would pass many hours before dawn, doling out jabs and pitting each other's intelligence against systems and repairs. It drove me crazy when I wrote up legitimate maintenance problems and he'd go down into the avionics bay with a rubber mallet and “re-rack” the equipment. He would literally just pull the offending item off its connection, shake it, and pound it back into place. It drove me doubly crazy that the majority of the time, it actually fixed the problem.

After three glorious months of flying out of my hometown of Minneapolis, I was rebased and sent to Detroit, and my silly banter with Brad came to a halt.

Hell does exist on earth. Airlines without a contract or union representation (we weren't union at this time) make pilots change their base
and
make them be responsible for getting to their new base
and
provide their own housing. Funny I didn't realize this before I got hired. I willingly went, and so began my introduction to commuting. We all did. We were living the dream.

In the days before 9/11, commuting was relatively easy. Pilots could ride in the cockpit jump seat of other airlines, and if there was a seat in the back with the passengers, they were welcome to sit back there, too. Post 9/11, everything...and I mean everything...changed. The glory and innocence of aviation was gone forever, thanks to a group of men with less than forty dollars in weaponry.

Due to the devastating financial losses to the airlines, they were running lean and mean, and not much has changed in the formula in the years since. Flights were now filled to the brim, which meant flight deck jump seats were full. While earning around two thousand dollars a month as a flight engineer, I couldn't afford to buy a ticket every time I went to work, so it sometimes took me two days to get to my base—especially during the holidays. I'd sit at the airport and work any kind of deal I could. If direct flights were full, I'd jump on any flight headed in my general direction that had connections to my destination. It was stressful, exhausting, and frustrating. By the time I got to my base, I was already burned out and trembling with the adrenaline of possibly not getting to work on time. All of this, we did for free. We didn't get paid to get to our base. I couldn't afford to constantly be moving either, so this was the alternative. Then the really fun part was that after all the joys of commuting, I'd get to my crash pad apartment that I usually shared with six to eight other pilots (yes, male) and had to sleep on the floor or couch if I was one of the last to arrive.

I had several of these apartments over the years and each with its own dynamic of roommates and arrangements. I could write an entire book just about crew crash pad apartments and the drama that is included in the rent. They are a true investigation into human nature and behavior. If you're on a flight right now, just think about where your pilot might have slept last night.

10
Tighten Your Seatbelt, Folks, It's Gonna Be a Bumpy Ride

1.
Pilots love turbulence

2.
Turbulence will fill the barf bag, but won't harm the aircraft

3.
Yes, the aircraft wings are supposed to flex like that

4.
You pay money at amusement parks for this, so enjoy

If it wasn't for company policy requiring me to go and find you some smooth air, I'd just tighten my seatbelt, put my arms up in the air and yell, “Yee haw!” I know what these airplanes are capable of, and turbulence, even severe, isn't going to harm the airplane. Yes, we know it spills your coffee, fills the barf bags, and makes you nervous, so you'll hear the engines change power settings as we try to search for a smoother ride.

Big weather systems can dominate an area at all altitudes, so during those minutes that feel like hours when we have to just ride it out, remember that these airplanes are put through wing loading tests that defy reality. New airplanes are required to withstand 150% of the maximum expected load for four seconds. So think of the worst turbulence that's ever been encountered and remember that the airplane can withstand 50% more than that.

The danger of turbulence, of course, are people and things that are not belted in. The flight attendants are most at risk, so pilots inform them if there is forecasted turbulence and ask that they be seated. Not wearing your seatbelt puts you and others around you in danger. Just wear your seatbelt, and you've eliminated the danger of turbulence. You have the power.

Generally, pilots know the area where there is a likelihood of turbulence. It's not an exact science, and that's the problem. You never know exactly where or when it will happen, so the best you can do it be ready for it. As long as you're in your seat, you might as well just strap in.

I have experienced days of annoyingly constant turbulence, like flying from Denver to Cancun and back, and never having a smooth patch of air. During those flights, you just learn to apologize to the passengers and drink your Coke without spilling it down the front of your white pilot shirt. Contrary to popular belief, it's the calm, smooth days that set you up for danger.

I was flying an empty Citation I from Minneapolis to Vancouver, BC. Since we were flying up to pick up a passenger, the captain let me sit in the left seat and fly the empty leg. It was a crystal clear day and not a bubble of weather anywhere. We had just crossed the intersection of where Montana, Washington, and Canada meet, and were digging into our crew meals.

The mountains were snowcapped and unintimidating from our altitude, and I could see one small line of wispy clouds that were gently rolling in place just ahead and below our altitude. We were just getting a little burble of rough air when suddenly,
WHAM
, we were at a 90 degree angle and the autopilot had instantly given up. We both yelled something to the effect of “Holy Shit!” and I grabbed the yoke and reduced the power as the airplane tried to figure out what end was up. We rocked and rolled for about twenty seconds and then as quickly as we'd entered it, we were in calm air again.

The cockpit had lettuce, Sprite, and ham sandwiches strewn around, and my flight bag had been turned upside down. It happened and ended so quickly, it took us a few moments to react. We just held on wondering if there was more to come and where the hell that came from. I finally looked over at the captain and his saucer eyes blinked once and then he looked at me, and said, “Was that a worm hole in time?”

I finally took a breath and said, “Yeah, it' must've been, because I just saw my whole life flash before my eyes.”

He dropped his shoulders and laughed as we got the autopilot back on and began to clean up the mess. I never had anything like that happen again, but when I think back, there were subtle indications of the enormous power rolled up into one little pocket of air. It was a transition between pressure systems combined with an up flow from the mountains. The only outward indication was a small strand of soft white clouds, but inside, it contained an invisible mass of power just waiting for something, or someone, to come inside.

Over a span of my first two years at Champion Air, my bases changed from Detroit to Dallas to Las Vegas to New York to St. Louis to Denver. It was a commuting nightmare. In all that time, I had not seen Brad since the first few months in Minneapolis. We had completely lost touch, and during those years I ended a serious relationship and accepted every upgrade opportunity that was offered, which allowed me to move up from flight engineer, to first officer, to captain in record time. I was now a junior captain and, once again, there was rumor of a new permanent base opening up—this time in Denver. Yee Haw! For me, this was the base I'd been dreaming of; the Rocky Mountains, milder winters (compared to Minnesota), backpacking, hiking, skiing, active lifestyles, and hippies everywhere you looked. I always knew we were in Denver when passengers boarded the airplane wearing wool sweaters, turtlenecks, shorts, and flip flops. I was in my glory thinking about moving to Denver as a thirty year old captain, while everyone else was dreading yet another base change.

Before I could move, I had to make sure this wasn't going to be a temporary base, so I decided to hold off moving for a few months to make sure the company could establish enough business to keep the base open. The company had flown out of Denver before, but only for contract work, and it lasted just a few months before the base closed. I didn't want that to happen again, especially as a junior captain. Junior captain is an oxymoron.

The bizarre aspect of leadership and being a captain in aviation is that it's based solely on flight hours and flight skill. If you pass your check ride, you can become captain—even if you are completely incapable of being a leader. Generally, I witnessed common elements of the good captains, and it boiled down to integrity, respect, and listening to your crew. All airline pilots are taught crew resource management, but not leadership, specifically. While sitting in the copilot and flight engineer's seat, I hung onto every word of the captains I admired and learned from the captains I detested about what not to do. I watched leadership styles that worked and blended it with my own ideology. I loved being a captain. I loved the personal challenge and found comfort in following the rules.

On my first flight into Denver as a new captain, the ground person guiding my aircraft into its parking spot was none other than Brad. Since Colorado was Brad's home state, I shouldn't have been surprised to see that he got the transfer back home. For the ground crew, it's difficult to see the captain, but if the sun isn't shining against the window, you can see into the cockpit. I still remember the huge smile on Brad's face when he realized who the captain was. He instantly started to over-exaggerate the directions he was giving me with the directional wands. Brad then purposely tried to misguide me, but I kept the nose wheel on the center parking line and stopped when he gave the order.

He came bolting up to the cockpit before the passengers had a chance to deplane and we instantly fell into the old rapport:

“Well Hello Ms.
Captain!
” Brad exclaimed, bowing to me like I was a queen “Oh my God, I can't believe they're letting a woman be in charge of this hunk of crap. What did you break on this aircraft today besides a fingernail?”

“Well, Brad, let's see...if the mechanics had actually done their pre-flight inspection this morning, they would have realized that the generator they signed off as repaired still isn't working properly, the oxygen tanks were so low they were barely able to be dispatched, and the flight engineer found a screwdriver in the wheel well. It doesn't have your name on it, so I assume it's yours. After all, confident mechanics put their initials on their tools.”

He responded with a big smile, a few more insults to the pilots' ability to break perfectly good aircraft, and an invitation for the entire flight crew to come to his house for a barbeque picnic the next day. We were all on a two-day layover and just begging for a reason to escape our hotel rooms. His was an offer we couldn't refuse. I rented a car from the hotel and the next afternoon, I loaded up my copilot, flight engineer, and two (of the four) flight attendants, and headed to Brad's house.

Brad's house had white walls, small dark rooms, and beer posters for decoration that screamed “Bachelor!” The home's claim to fame was that Brad had remodeled the kitchen and took down a support wall without a permit. It had a fenced yard that contained his new dog and a small garden growing weeds mixed with cosmos and lettuce, which I found sad and charming.

When I asked if he needed help with the barbeque, he said that he did. In fact, he said he had no food to put on the barbeque, so we all went to the store, but I got stuck paying for all the food. I didn't mind. I was the captain of this crew and I wanted to take care of everyone.

At this point in my life, I was at the zenith of what I thought was success in the year 2000. I was a junior captain making about a hundred dollars per hour and I could fly about a thousand hours per year. I owned my car outright, I had no credit card debt, and I had seventy-five thousand dollars cash sitting in my savings account. I had no social life outside of work and I lived out of a suitcase. I was planning a three week trip to Kenya and was finagling my schedule to make it all work. You'd think I would be sick of traveling, but I still felt like something within me was lacking. That damn feminine mystique. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but I needed to get outside of my comfort zone and try something new. I figured a safari to Africa would be something completely exotic and would fill the lacking in my heart.

What I really needed were a few close friends, but at the time I didn't realize something so simple was so important. I had no close friends anymore, but I didn't notice the sense of loss. I had a built-in social life at every layover. When I got home after being with people every waking and sleeping moment, I just wanted to be alone. I was too busy to fill my downtime with friends. Other women couldn't understand the passion I had for my career. My job fulfilled me. I wondered what women did a generation ago when they didn't have careers.

I was financially independent, which meant freedom, but I was exhausted to the point where I couldn't even relax. I felt if I slowed down, I'd lose the feeling. Pride, power, and money are a lethal, addictive combination. No matter what problem came along, I would whisper to my soul, “If you can captain a commercial airliner, you can do
this
! You can fix any problem and overcome any barrier.
You can do this...
”

My arrogant mindset allowed me to do two things. First, I went through my early adulthood never feeling like I
needed
a man in my life. Sure, I liked having a man in my life, but I never thought I'd have to depend on one, so I never viewed men through the filter of a potential wife and mother. The truth about aviation, which every pilot eventually figures out, is that you simply cannot have it all without a great spouse. My ego hadn't allowed this thought to enter into my filtering process. I just never thought I would have to ever rely on someone else for anything.

Second, I figured since I could pilot any make, model, and type of aircraft, I could manage any abnormalities that came along in a relationship. What's the worst thing that could happen? If I couldn't fix it, I figured there'd be a checklist so that I could still operate normally with something not working properly.

My self-induced power gave me the opportunity to pick someone so completely incompatible because I never had to consider him to be my equal. I had the power to love whoever I wanted and since Brad made me laugh, offered a completely different way of looking at life, and shared the core of who we were in aviation, I was ready to step off the deep end to feel the sensation of unconstrained freedom.

Every time I'd ever seen Brad at work, he was always trying to flirt with the flight attendants, so when I felt the first pass at me at the barbeque, I instantly assumed it was his mode of operation and I was just one among many. I'd heard through the grapevine that he had been dating a flight attendant for the last three months, and on a recent flight she had gloriously announced to the crew in the flight deck that she was sleeping with him because she had a ton of car issues that needed repair, and Brad would do it for free. I'd felt badly for him knowing she was only using him and willing to announce it to everyone at work.

Brad thought he was still dating his flight attendant, and I routinely reminded myself that he didn't know how she truly felt about the relationship. They had been dating three months and it was the longest relationship he'd ever been in, so
he
thought it was quite serious. I didn't think it was my place to tell him what she'd said to us in the cockpit so, instead, I accepted a few of his good natured passes and threw a few back at him. It did my heart good to see him blush, since he was usually the forward one. It also made my heart weak. Under the façade, there was vulnerability and softness that he didn't usually let show, and I felt empowered to bring that out of him. As the night moved on at the barbeque, and as the rest of the crew was playing Frisbee, our chairs got closer and the talk turned more serious.

He talked about his mom being divorced twice while he was growing up, along with his stages of loneliness as he transferred to three different colleges while trying to find his niche in the world. His parents had divorced when he was just five years old and, as is the trend, his dad was not a daily part of his life and only inserted himself to take Brad on road trips, which Brad remembered fondly. His dad was a longtime functioning alcoholic, so Brad has purposely stayed away from alcohol because he said he could feel his own tendencies of addiction pull him to the dark side. He had experimented heavily with drugs in college, and ultimately concluded that he should probably stay away from those, too. He also admitted to having emotional swings and attributed it to inheriting his dad's addiction issues. He said the swings were a constant pull side to side, but that he could deal with it by watching what and when he ate.