A Chick in the Cockpit (9 page)

Hungry and mad, I went back to the slopes and skied a few more runs, but I couldn't enjoy myself because I was focused on trying to find Brad. The lifts stopped running at 3:30, so I headed to the car and finally, about 4:00 pm, Brad came moseying back to the car with a smile on his face. He said the skiing was great. He informed me that since he had money, he decided to buy lunch at the chalet instead of coming back to the car for the sack lunch. I just stood there. I asked if he realized I had no money or keys to the car, and he smacked his forehead and said, “Dude, I'm so sorry. I was just having so much fun, I totally forgot. You're so mellow and laid back; I figured you wouldn't mind...”

So here's the thing, I just acted like a dude and said, “Whatever. Glad you had fun.”

I was off-the-charts pissed because he was so inconsiderate, but I just swallowed it. I was his dude girlfriend—something I'd strived to be with my men friends. Just one of the guys. I had paid for his lift ticket, he took my cash and put it in the pocket of his ski pants for safe keeping, and that was the last thought he had of me being there with him. He knew I was nervous about skiing again, but satisfying his own pleasure overrode all thoughts. His self-fulfillment was all that mattered.

I didn't stand up for myself and say what I thought. I just let it go because I thought by not saying anything, I'd be the better person and the dude girlfriend you'd want to hang out with. I'd strived to be treated like a dude my entire career, which muddled my mind to what is expected from a relationship. I told myself to let it go. But, as we all know, it doesn't just let go. It lingers—forever—no matter how righteous you are. We can all do our Buddha imitations and say we know how to forgive, but we all still vividly remember it, and just the thought pisses us off all over again. You'll be cruising along at your altitude in life and then suddenly, you hit the jet stream and you're pushing against 200 mph winds. You'll finally have to admit defeat, land, and take on more fuel

We're taught that forgiveness is a practice for removing unhealthy emotions. Fuck that. If the other person does something wrong, why do you have to forgive them? Why do we have to suck it? Isn't that more unhealthy? Swallowing all that acid and bile other people hand you will eat you up inside. I'm of the opinion that the idea of forgiveness is an excuse to justify the feeling of the anger because we're not supposed to feel anger, especially women. We should just be angry about the things that make us angry and leave it at that. Sure, anger is an unhealthy emotion, but only if you don't move it onto the next stage of doing something about it. Buddha says that “Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”

But I say that if you move that hot coal fast enough, you might only get singed. Anger can be good. It can rise up in that part of your character that inspires you to do something about it. Or, you can push it down into the pit of your heart and let it smolder forever. But I didn't know all that back then. All I knew was this was a new kind of guy I was dating—the proverbial “bad boy”—and dating a “bad boy” came with different kinds of baggage. I hadn't figured out the trick of knowing when to land in time to avoid running out of fuel in midair.

The car accident and being left on the ski slope are just minor examples among thousands of the cliché “red flags” which your momma warned you about, but we knowingly ignore. Picking the wrong guy was a reflection of my inability to understand myself. I thought all those red flags were a warning meant for others, not me, because I could fix and fly anything. I was going to captain this relationship to my destination even if I was fighting strong headwinds for the entire flight. In retrospect, I wish someone pulled that red flag out of the ground and smacked me over the head with it. Repeatedly. It's not necessarily the actions in and of themselves that I was concerned about; it's the reaction and sentiment
behind
the action. He simply didn't think about my welfare at all. Your partner's inability to have empathy for you should always worry you.

For me, I had spent a lifetime of having empathy trying to understand men. As a woman working and living in their world, I didn't want to stand out or cause a fuss. I wanted to see what they see and be what they didn't expect to see in a woman. I had spent so much of my energy wanting to be like them, I forgot how wonderful being a woman is. I forgot that we are amazing creatures with our unique abilities and that in a harmonized world, men and women create a balance for each other. I forgot to stand up and be proud that I am a woman. Instead, I unfastened my seatbelt and started walking around the cabin, even though I could see a thunderstorm brewing in the distance.

12
Cruise Checklist

1.
Seat back – reclined

2.
Fuel burn – monitor and balance

3.
Call flight attendant for crew meals. If you've pissed them off, check for spit

4.
Now that you're comfortable, don't be lulled into a stupor

We've reached our final cruising altitude. The air is smooth, so I'll go ahead and turn off the seatbelt sign. You are free to get up and move about the cabin. In the flight deck, the autopilot is on and the flight engineer is balancing the fuel burn. The flight attendants have stopped complaining to us that the passengers are too hot, then too cold. I can see for miles, and now we have nothing to do except talk to air traffic control. But because it's my leg to fly, my first officer has to do all the talking. This is when I drop my seat back a bit, lean my head back and breathe in a moment of Zen. It's when we let our guard down that we are the most vulnerable and unprepared for an emergency, but those moments are so important in life, it's usually worth the risk.

I loved risking a brush against a growing thunderstorm. There is nothing more sublime than being at cruise altitude on a late afternoon at flight level 350 on a hot summer day. Watching the towering cumulonimbus clouds reaching for the stratosphere always made me feel so inconsequential, and I was always amazed that sometimes the air around the storms would be absolutely serene.

The strength of those late afternoon storms are hard to imagine since a cloud has no touch, no feel, no strength. It is the gathering of all those molecules of water and atmosphere that gives it force and it can turn into a deadly super cell in just a matter of minutes. It is the collapsing of these storms that causes the damage. All that strength reaching upwards, only to find the air too thin to sustain any more growth, causes the storm to change direction downward with conviction, creating straight-line winds, flash flooding rains, and pounding hail. The storm cells that reach the highest have the most strength because they have the farthest to fall...which proved to be a prophetic metaphor for my life.

The red-eye flight from Las Vegas to St. Louis was living up to its name. As we turned the Boeing onto final approach, the ragged edge of the sun was boring over the horizon just enough to strain our weary eyes. Most of the passengers were still in a drunken haze long after the flight attendants had run out of liquor. Like a young child on a long road trip, the lead flight attendant kept ringing the cockpit to find out how much further we had to go. I kept telling him we'd get there when we got there.

Captains get to choose which legs we want to fly. Copilots know that captains delegate the pathetic legs to them, so my copilot knew in Las Vegas, without even having to ask, that he'd be flying this leg. We had been on the road for five days, my uniform was getting ripe, and we were tired from holding up the image of being pilots. Besides, it was his turn to fly.

My copilot was new, but he'd proven himself over the last few days. I'd chuckle to myself when I'd glance over at him during a particularly difficult altitude crossing restriction or crosswind landing and he'd have his tongue wrapped around his lip in concentration. He was doing this now as we turned onto final approach on this beautiful, calm day of fall. I wasn't sure what was causing him to overextend his concentration, but exhaustion has a way of blearing your thoughts.

His altitude and airspeed were perfect as he called out his requests.

“Gear down.”

“Roger, here they come.”

“Flaps, thirty degrees. Final items.”

I was so proud of his perfect stabilized approach. I relaxed and sat back to watch his beautiful landing.

“200 feet.”

“50 feet.”

WHAM!

In the two seconds it took for me to realize he was going to forget to flare, I couldn't get my hands to move fast enough to the yoke to slow the rate of descent. As we slammed into the runway, I could feel the landing gear groan into their sockets and we landed hard enough to drop a few oxygen masks in the back. It wasn't anything more than a firm landing, but for the passengers, I'm sure they thought the end was near.

I'm the captain. It's my fault. Even if the copilot makes a mistake, it's on me. Every pilot has had this bad landing. It is part of the initiation into becoming a good pilot, but when I looked over at my copilot, he was crimson and drowning in his embarrassment. We were both so sure he was going to grease it onto the runway that the outcome was out of the realm of our possibilities. He was wallowing in his misery, so I tried to lighten the mood.

“Well, that'll wake up the drunks back there! You probably did the flight attendants a favor by getting the passengers out of their stupor so they can deplane. I'm sure you meant to do that, but you do realize that the flight attendants are going to demand that you stand in the doorway and offer every single passenger a back massage...”

The flight engineer started to join in on the razzing, and I could see my copilot's lips quiver in the attempt to keep a smile away, and he began to lighten up a little. We opened the cockpit door as the passengers were deplaning at the gate, so they could chime in on the teasing.

About midway through deplaning, we could hear the grumble of a deep and drunken voice creep louder as he pushed his enormous mass into the cockpit. He was slurring his complaints until his breath got caught in the back of his throat as he saw me sitting there in the captain's seat with my long blond hair in a ponytail.

“Oh my God. There is a chick in the cockpit! I knew it. I knew there had to be some reason for that gawd-awful crash landing. Well, hell, no wonder why. Women can't and shouldn't be flying. Wait until I tell my wife about this. Hey, honey...”

It wasn't worth explaining that the male copilot made the landing. It never was worth explaining anything about being a chick in the cockpit. I just smiled at him and said I'd be out by baggage claim giving massages. He offered to take his shirt off right then and there, but he had left his suitcase in the aisle and the passengers behind him were stuck, so the flight attendants pulled him out of the cockpit.

My copilot and flight engineer thought this was hysterical. My copilot was also relieved to realize that most everyone thought I'd made the landing, so he smirked and said he was going to get in line for the back message behind the drunk.

“Fuck you,” I laughed.

My shy copilot from Nebraska found the nerve to respond with a good-hearted, “Okay.”

To which I replied, “Not after a bad landing like that. My back hurts.”

“That's okay, I'll let you be on top.”

And with that, we all start laughing until our red eyes fill with tears. With our veins flooded with exhaustion and adrenaline, it's hard to stop laughing because it feels so good. It's in these moments of humor and smack talk that my heart soars. I'm not offended. I am dauntless and I know I can hold my own, so I can tease about not being a man. When I'm in the cockpit, I am not a woman. I am a pilot. I am on top. I have earned my right to be a member of my crew and everything that it means. Everyone's lives depend on our trust in each other, and even after my copilot's bad landing, I knew I could trust him. He knew he could trust me.

As we walked down the jet bridge together, we knew we had to put on our serious pilot faces to walk through the terminal. We all lived in different states, so we waved good-bye and knew we'd see each other again after our four short days off were over.

Thankfully, the flight I needed to catch home was only a few gates away. United to Denver. The flight was full, so there weren't any cabin seats in which to sit my weary ass. I had to sit in the jump seat in the cockpit that was designed by an inventor who learned how to duplicate the comfort of concrete.

I arrived in Denver at 6:40 a.m. MDT on the morning of September 11, 2001.

I had been awake for too long to know my name as I rested my head on my pillow. I was so tired, and it was cruel irony that I couldn't fall to sleep. I finally stumbled into unconsciousness and just as I was about to go over the ledge and find sleep, the ringing of my phone bolted me awake with confusion.

“Hello?”

“Oh good. You're home. Turn on the TV.” It was my sister in Iowa. I told her I was so tired that I didn't know if I could even make it back to bed. Instead, I was going to curl up and sleep on the floor where I stood.

“Erika. No. Really. Something is going on. An airplane just hit the World Trade Center.”

“What? Here in Denver? How can that be, the weather is good.”

“No. In New York.”

“Was it a single engine airplane that got lost? Is the weather bad? Is anyone else hurt?”

“Erika. I'm hanging up now. Just turn on the damn TV.”

Well, that was rude. My sister just hung up on me. I turned on my old TV and just stood there watching and trying to comprehend what they were saying. Wait, what? What were they saying? How could it be? It was a beautiful New York day. How could an airliner have gotten so off course that it actually hit a building? Wait. Oh no. What the hell is that? Oh my God, it's another plane. Please. No. No. No.

Everyone remembers where they were at that crushing, tragic moment.

In my mind, I was sitting in that cockpit with the crew. I closed my eyes and my brain projected the image of what they might have seen. The image loop repeated, and I couldn't find the “erase” button. I am a pilot. My heart ached for the crew and their families.

For all of us, 9/11 was a profound moment. Something as simple as a few box cutters killed thousands of innocent people and changed aviation forever. I had the feeling that it could have just as easily been me who died that day. Life was precarious, and all I'd done with mine was fly it away. If it had been me in the cockpit of one of the doomed flights, what would I have left behind except a tragedy? I hadn't completed the full human experienced of life, love, or birth. I had spent my life thinking about what was next rather than fully experiencing the moment I lived in. My moments were dreams about what was the next airplane I would fly. How much money would I make? What's the next company I'd work for, where is the next base? What's the next superficial achievement on my checklist?

In the weeks following 9/11, Brad and I quietly held hands and talked about life, our fears, and our dreams. We compared bucket lists and combined our desires into one bucket. The conversation began a deeper level of thinking about our relationship and what our lives held for the future, together. We realized we had common hopes and dreams, and at the root of it was our shared passion for the aviation industry. I was deeply grateful to have found someone who understood my crazy work schedule, someone with whom I could share my fears and accomplishments. And because he was in the industry, we could truly sympathize with what we were experiencing. Since he wanted to become a commercial pilot, too, I was thrilled to be on this journey with him. He was someone I believed could understand me on a deeper level, since he wholeheartedly acknowledged that, at my core, I was a pilot first and a person second. He said that was what he admired about me—and I admired him for being able to accept me as I was.

Since we had similar broken families, we discussed how we would be different. We saw the stupidity of letting emotions and hate get in the way of making good decisions. More than most couples, we also shared an industry like no one else we knew. Aviation was our lives, so we had respect for each other's professions, despite the teasing. I admired Brad that he could troubleshoot a problem on the airplane, find the flaw and fix the problem. I was thrilled to see Brad guide my aircraft into the gate at the end of a long day. He would come up and talk about the mechanical troubles that the airplane had, and when no one was looking, we'd steal a passionate kiss in the cockpit.

Although our company acknowledged workplace romances happened continuously, it was still discouraged, so we kept it as quiet as long as possible. We forgot to follow our clandestine checklist, so our cover was blown when Brad rode along on one of my charter flights.

My crew and I were contracted to fly a college football team, and charters away from our normal routes required a mechanic to fly along. Luckily, Brad was assigned to my flight and was sitting in the jump seat behind my captain's seat while we were waiting for passengers to load. He was leaning forward reading a manual while he quietly reached around and touched my left breast. We tried to contain our laughter as I jumped and blushed. From the angle Brad was sitting in, no one should have been able to see what he did, except that this flight was at night and the reflection of his action bounced into the eyes of my flight engineer. He sat up, looked at us both and said, “Hey, what's going on with you two?” We just looked guilty, and it dawned on the engineer what was going on. We realized the news of our relationship would spread like wildfire, and accepted our fate. Within days, everyone knew we were dating. It was out there and we were proud of it. Our romantic lives as pilot and mechanic together had officially begun.

After 9/11, I decided to give up the townhouse I'd been renting in Greenwood Village and move in with Brad. I spent all my time at his house anyway, so the townhouse was just an expensive storage locker for furniture. He'd been asking me to move in for several months, and I finally thought what the hell? This is the moment, live it to the fullest. I was settled into my cruise altitude, so I felt comfortable unbuckling my seatbelt.

My cocker spaniel was getting up in years and I loved the idea of having a place with a doggy door, so I told Brad I'd pay his mortgage, which was the same as my rent, if he paid the utilities. We started playing house, and this time I didn't revert to my childhood and rip the head off the Ken doll.

In preparation for our togetherness, I had also cancelled my lifelong dream trip to Kenya. I had booked and paid for the safari months earlier, but it didn't feel right to be so self-indulgent during the thrill of new beginnings together. Brad didn't ask me to cancel it, but he acknowledged that the sacrifice showed just how much I loved him. It was an expensive trip, but I had almost six figures cash in my savings account. Leaving it at that level felt powerful, and Brad was humble when I said I'd send us on a different trip together.