The alarm clock went off at 4 am. I rolled over, silenced the soft melody programmed on my cell phone, and continued the roll all the way until my feet were on the floor. I was surprised because even though the cell phone clocked screamed WAY TOO EARLY, I was wide awake. I quickly walked to the shower and within 15 minutes, I walked out of the apartment in khakis and the collared shirt I had laid out right before setting my alarm the night before.
It was still dark outside as I made my way to my car, suitcase in tow. The mornings here are still cool enough to make long sleeve shirts comfortable but the first signs of summer are beginning to show. The air is muggier than normal, and for 4 am, I was surprised at how sweaty I was becoming. After tossing my 40 lb suitcase and my trusty-yet-overstuffed USAFA backpack in the trunk, I plopped down behind the steering wheel and closed the door. I stared wide-eyed out the windshield while I tried to catch my breath. My heart was racing and my adrenaline pumping but not from any physical exertion What am I doing? Just go... I said to myself as I started my car and turned on the air conditioning.
It took little more than an hour to walk through the doors of the Orlando International Airport terminal. I had managed to relax during my drive but adrenaline was once again flowing. I approached a woman at the American Airlines ticket counter and handed her a piece of paper that had been emailed to me the week before. "Mr. Christopher Boyes has been scheduled for an interview with American Eagle Airlines on May 20th..." The rest of the letter goes on to explain how to list me as a standby passenger to Dallas.
The woman behind the counter couldn't have been more pleasant. I have spent countless hours in airports over the years and have become very familiar with their layout and the most efficient ways to get in and out. "Okay," she said to me after taking my luggage, " come with me. We'll see how the security lines are." She walked me to the front of the crew line and I was ushered through security. "Good luck on your interview. I hope it goes well! Make sure to check in at the gate. You should get first class" she said to me as she turned to make her way back to the ticket counter.
She was true to her word and I was issued a first class boarding pass as I boarded the medium-sized jet destined for Dallas/Fort Worth. I felt too embarrassed to take advantage of the free breakfast or the hot towel. After all, I hadn't earned this right; it was merely an interview. I leaned back and just tried to relax. Here we go I thought to myself as we accelerated for take-off and seemingly before the wheels had left the ground, I was asleep.
As if I had entered a time-machine, I awoke several hours later as we pulled up to the gate in Dallas. It didn't take me long to find my way to the baggage claim and find the bus to the hotel. American Eagle flew me into town a day early to ensure I was available for the interview the following morning. I spent much of my Sunday cramming for the interview studying any piece of information I could get my hands on. I scoured the internet for gauge in hopes of finding new information about the interview. I arrived at the hotel at 9 am and spent the majority of the day in my room. I went through my application paperwork for the 20th time and scoured for any missing information. I had heard horror stories of people being sent home before the interview had even started because of incomplete paperwork. This worried me greatly. One of the 6 attachments I had to print out requested driving records from each state of residence over the last 10 years. The task would be daunting and would take much longer to obtain than the 10 days I was given. Dealing with one DMV with a valid license is bad enough. I was going to have to get records from Colorado, California, Montana, Ohio, and Florida and that just didn't happen.
After I walked to a local Mexican restaurant for dinner, I made my way back to my room to continue studying. Being alone in my head for the last 48 hours (I took Saturday off to pack and finish my paperwork) had taken its toll. "What am I DOING?!" I confessed in panic and desperation. "I'm not a pilot. I don't want to do this. Why would I want to go to a regional airline? Maybe I should just give it up now and start looking for management jobs!" The fear of failure was palpable. I had come so far, I had worked so hard, yet had never gotten this close. Too many times in the past, incredibly poor timing had caused me to get close but fall short. I'd been let down by "the man" several times before but it had made disappointment easier to swallow. It was his fault, not mine. I could always use countless cliches to belay my sadness: C'est la vie, this is life, it is what it is. They've all been a part of my regular vocabulary for so long. Now, I had to perform and if I didn't make it, it was because I just wasn't good enough; and that was terrifying.
****
It couldn't have been more than 5 minutes before we pulled into an office complex of 3 and 4 story buildings. It looking rather inconspicuous to the naked eye as a group of normal offices. As we turned the corner and entered the parking lot, the sign at the entrance caught my eye and made my heart jump: "American Airlines" and below it "Headquarters." American Eagle, the company with whom I was interviewing, is owned by American Airlines. I had always thought they'd have separate facilities but, as I had just found out, they didn't. The wide-eyed look on my face must've been entertaining. I once again began to feel inadequate and out of place. The van stopped to let us out and as we walked through the revolving door of the large building, a woman behind a desk near the entryway stood up. "Hello, welcome. Are you here for the interview?" Our wonderment most definitely gave us away. She made each of us security badges and showed us to the recruiting office.
The waiting room was large and had enough chairs to seat 40 people, yet there were only four of us here. I sat down in a chair facing the back wall. I hadn't noticed it when I came in, but the entire back wall was painted like this:
It only added to my anxiety. This was for keeps.
After 20 minutes, a man met us and brought us to the back to a much less imposing conference room; one with a view of the outside. After a 30 minute briefing on the company and the reasons why they were hiring, he began to explain the interview process. It was very similar to what I had read online which comforted me slightly but it wasn't long before he finished and asked for a volunteer to fly the simulator first. A young man, not much older than 24 and with merely 500 total hours raised his hand first. He was applying for a CFI pipeline position the company was offering to junior instructors to help build time faster. I felt embarrassed for letting the younger and more inexperienced guy beat me to the punch, but I still wasn't ready to pull the trigger. Of course, merely minutes after he left, another man called me out of the room to begin the technical portion. So much for procrastinating.
We walked through a maze of cubicles and shortly found ourselves in a small office with two chairs and a computer. A second man was waiting for us there and was introduced as the one who would be conducting the HR portion of the interview. The man who I had walked with would be asking the technical questions. I sat down in the chair and one of the interviewers (turned out they were both pilots for the company) had mentioned something about training for a marathon. I recognized an opportunity and jumped on it. "Oh yeah? I ran a half marathon in California several years ago, which one are you training for?" What ensued was a 15 minute conversation about running and training and the like. It was loose enough in the room for me to sneak in a few jokes which were met with laughs by the gentlemen interviewing me.
We had apparently strayed far enough from the task at hand and after a fairly awkward transition, he began asking me questions. "The first questions I'm going to ask are from the packet we sent you to memorize." Exactly 7 days before the interview, I was sent a 15 page packet of information that I was required to commit to memory. It was supposed to show me and subsequently show them how well I would do in training. One of the excellent abilities I garnered from USAFA was the ability to commit incredible amounts of information to memory. The first five questions he asked were from the packet and with little to no hesitation, I answered them confidently and correctly. "Okay then he chuckled as he put away the sheet. That's enough of that." For the next 20 minutes, I was asked questions about regulations, charts, approaches, and other pilot stuff. Most of the questions I found to be easy and we smoothly transitioned from one chart to the other.
After he scoured the charts in search of symbols and procedures I didn't know, he moved on to a scenario. He put a printed and encoded weather observation and forecast. "Can you read for me the first two lines of the forecast." I had to fight to hold back my smile. After answering it correctly, he moved on to the observation and asked me to read it to him. I went on to read the entire thing from start to finish including the obscure symbols at the end and had done so in nearly a single breath. When I finished, he looked at his co-interviewer, he said "I don't think we've ever had anyone do it that well." I couldn't help myself. I chuckled a little as I said, "Well, I majored in Meteorology in college. I would hope I can read a weather observation." One of the guys smiled and admitted that he had graduated from Embry-Riddle and wished they had had a meteorology major when he was there. It was then that I took my second opportunity to derail the interview...and I did so successfully.
After what seemed like an eternity, the grilling was over. We eventually moved on to HR questions but these are typically pretty easy. "Tell me how you resolve conflict in the work place" or "tell me what your biggest challenge will be in training." As long as you don't tell them that you tend to start fist fights and that you don't like studying, you're fine. As I walked out of the room, a massive weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I rocked it. I had absolutely rocked it and I couldn't begin to explain how relieved I was.
When I walked back into the room, the first guy to go to the simulator had just started talking about how his sim went. "I don't know. Ugh. It was a lot different from what I was used to. I don't know that I did that well." They had asked me how the technical portion had gone and just as I was about to answer, the simulator supervisor called me. It was my turn. Great, why did I have to hear that he did bad right before I was called? I grabbed the charts they had issued to me at the beginning of the interview and walked to the sim room. As I was leaving, another man came into the room and called the younger pilot and asked him to bring his bags with him. I thought that was odd because he hadn't yet done the technical portion As they walked down the hall, it donned on me that he was being lead out of the building. He had not gotten the job. Wow. No pressure.
I will spare you all the details but include a few very important ones. As I took off, the simulator quickly entered the clouds. Turn left, turn right, climb, descend. Those were all relatively simple tasks. Intercept and fly to this navigational aid. Now, hold on this navigational aid. I have been teaching these concepts for over a year now but it had been awhile since I was the one doing them. I never really got confused but was concentrating hard. I was going to do this right! After we had done all the tasks, I landed and he asked me to fill out the grading sheet with my name and date of interview. I tried to get him to hint at how I did, but he wouldn't budge. He's clearly done this before. I thought I'd done well, but without feedback, I began to wonder. At the beginning of the interview, they had told us that if we weren't offered the job, they weren't allowed to tell us why, just that we hadn't been offered a job.
As I walked back to the room, I began to run through the simulation in my head. I scoured my brain trying to recount every detail. When I entered, a second pilot was asked to gather his bags before he'd had a chance to fly the simulator. Apparently he had done the technical portion while I was in the simulator and not done well. My heart began to race. What if I had been told to fly FROM the station instead of to. What if I was cleared to land on a different runway?! I thought incredibly hard and tried to remember exactly what he had said but couldn't. And then my heart sank. I remembered something he had told me at the beginning. "At some point during this, I will ask you to recite the emergency procedure you were given to memorize in your packet." I had never been asked to recite it. That's it. They didn't give me it because I had already failed the sim. They didn't want waste time. The only other remaining interviewee, an Air Force pilot oddly stationed with one of my really good friends, had just been taken to the sim and I was alone in the room. I hastily grabbed my backpack, my papers, my folder and packed my bag. I put it on my suitcase and grabbed my suit jacket. I can't believe I had been so dumb after doing so well. I can't believe I blew it.
The door stood open and I stood still in dread for the grim reaper of interviewers to tell me to gather my things. The wait was unbearable. I paced back and forth in the small conference room and continued searching my brain. About 15 minutes later, the other pilot returned. Time is on my side. I knew from the previous two that were asked to leave, it had been relatively soon after they had failed that they were asked to leave. Thirty minutes after my sim, a man walked in. As he entered the room, I felt myself walking to my bags. "Well, we can't wait any longer. Here are some vouchers for the cafeteria. You each get $6. Be back here at, let's say, 1245." I'm supposed to eat?! Are you kidding me?! I can barely breathe!
After a quick lunch in the nicest cafeteria I've ever eaten in, the other guy and I walked back to the room to wait. Then, at exactly 1245, the grim reaper showed up. "Christopher, can you grab your bags and come with me." Just as I had suspected. It was over. At least I gotten a free meal out of it, I suppose. I grabbed my suitcase, jacket, and backpack. I was led into a room around the corner and asked to take a seat. The room was barely big enough to fit a table and two chairs. There was no Pomp and Circumstance here. I sat down, heart in my stomach. Man I wish I hadn't have had any caffeine at lunch, I thought as my heart beat faster than it does when I run. "Well, Chris," the man said "congratulations! We'd like to make you an offer."
I literally sighed aloud. "Wow" is all I could manage to say. I couldn't believe it. I felt silly for all the feelings I had felt in the previous days and especially for what I felt in the past hour. Wow. There I sat, almost exactly 7 years after graduating from the Air Force Academy, staring at a piece of paper offering me a position with an airline (pending a background investigation, of course)...and I couldn't believe it.
It would take another hour to go through finger-printing and gathering all the paperwork I had completed. When I finished, the man said, "just let us know when you have completed your ATP written test and have 1500 hours. It shouldn't take long after that to get you into a class." Wow. I have spent every weekend since arriving in Daytona a year and 4 months ago...and technically would not have search anymore. I continue to chase after my dream, but for the first time since I started this blog in August of 2011, I have seen the light at the end of the tunnel. With the current turmoil and uncertainty in the regional airline business, it could very well be a train, but at least it's light. The dark was starting to get lonely.
As I walked out of the building, I handed my badge to the nice woman at the front desk. "Congratulations," she said as we walked away. I smiled widely and nearly shouted "Thanks!" Walking out of the building after six hours of stress was relieving but my journey was far from over. My flight was scheduled on American Airlines back to Orlando at 5 and even more importantly, I had somewhere else to go...
The phone rang and I hoped my uncle would answer on the other end. "Chris!!! CONGRATULATIONS!" He yelled on the other line. I had been texting him since I heard the news and was calling to tell him the story, but more important to get information. "Charlie, I will definitely tell you the story of what happened, but could you do me a favor first? Could you see when the next flight leaves for Amsterdam? I need to go to see Richard." Not more than 10 minutes later, he called back. "How close are you to the airport?" He asked. I told him that I was riding there presently. "Okay, well, if you can make it there in 30 minutes, you might be in Belgium by the end of the day..."
To be continued...
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