The First of Many Flights

It's time.

After a two week wait, I decided to make the trip back home to be with my family on Thanksgiving.  As I was sitting in the airport waiting for my sister to pick me up, I checked my schedule.  What had once been completely blank now displayed two cryptic numbers: S3192A and S3221A.  Both of them were underlined in blue indicating that I could explore those tidbits further.  After some investigation and some anticipation, I learned that I had finally been scheduled for my first two trips following the Thanksgiving holiday.  I'd have to commute back to St Louis Saturday morning to catch my 8:00 am flight on Sunday.  This blog is the story of that trip.

Sunday, December 1, 2013

I would like to say that I awoke with a start.  Set for 6:00am, my alarm sounded as I laid in my hotel bed staring at the ceiling.  I'd gotten some sleep the night before but with the butterflies wreaking havoc in my abdomen, there was no way I'd gotten a "full night's rest."  After showering, I finished packing my overnight bag, put ice in my cooler, and put my iPad in my flight kit.  All stacked and hooked together, I toted the bags out of my room and to my car where I drove in silence to the airport.  Adrenaline was pulsing through my veins constantly making me feel like vomiting.  My mind, not to be outdone by the pit in my stomach, was racing.  I parked my car in the remote parking lot, boarded the employee van and sat staring at my phone waiting for someone to distract me.  Apparently no one was interested in it this morning.  I posted a quick comment on my Facebook and put my phone on airplane mode as I walked through the terminal.

I approached a less than friendly gate agent who snapped at me trying to find out what I wanted.  "This is, uh, my first flight and I need to go to the airplane."  Disinterested, she curtly barked the door code at me and went about typing.  I walked to the door, typed the code in, and began to walk through the jetway to the airplane.

It was a brisk morning in St Louis and as I walked through the door, the cold air caught me off guard as much as the gate agent did.  The nine year old child in me continued to plead with me not to keep walking into the abyss.  It was cold and we would be lost forever!  Putting him out of my mind, I continued on.  I passed through the door to the airplane where the flight attendant was and instead of smiling from her position between me and the cockpit as she would a passenger, she opened a door to the closet and showed me where to put my bags.  "Would you like some water, hun? "  The woman, in her late 40s, must've sensed and most likely seen the anxiety pasted across my face.

The Captain came up from behind me and, as cold as the morning air, told me what to do.  "I'm going to do the walk-around.  You get set up and complete your receiving flow.  You've got 5 minutes so don't take all day."  Surely he knows this is my first day, right? Everyone sure is in a great mood this morning.

What seemed like seconds later, he was back and sitting down.  I had completed most of my checks by the time he walked in.  "The training department does nothing to prepare you for flying the line.  So, I'm going to do most of the flying today and the radios.  You just try to keep up."  I wanted to assure him that I was capable but recalled a lovely lesson from my mom that actions do speak louder than words.  Clearly he'd had bad experiences before with new hires so I decided to show him I was competent.

A few seconds passed and a man in a neon vest handed the Captain a piece of paper.  I assumed this was the cargo load sheet.  Behind him was the flight attendant and she handed him the passenger distribution.  "I'm ready when you are" she told him and he instructed her to close the doors.  My heart and mind were racing at a break neck pace.  I knew what was going on but this all seemed so foreign to me.  I was capable of operating the airplane but none of this was familiar.

I heard the bell of the jetway ringing as it backed away from the door and looked back for a moment to see what was going on.  The flight attendant had been standing in the cockpit doorway the entire time but now I had a clear view to the back of the airplane....and it was full.  No more than 10 feet away sat a boy in his mid-teens and behind him I assumed was his younger sister.  Both of them looked were looking at me and as my gaze met theirs, they diverted their attention to their hands in their laps.  As I followed the boy's eyes, I saw him picking at his fingernails.

It was at that moment that it hit me.  The boy was nervous.  The boy?  Who was he and where was he going?  It only took three seconds looking at a stranger to realize that their families all had 100% unflinching confidence he would return home safely after the Thanksgiving trip to St Louis.  There were 48 other people on the airplane and I had never met any of them. I didn't know any of their stories and none of them knew mine.  They all had blind faith in me and the Captain.  This was real and there was no room for error.  It was then that the flight attendant closed the door and I reached up and locked it before turning back around.  I put on my headset and experienced silence for the first time since getting out of my car.  If only I had a picture of what my face must've looked like.  I can only imagine the blood had left it long before and was showing the pasty whiteness tell that my feelings had gone from anxiety to fear.  At that moment, I wanted to admit I didn't know what I was doing.  Having ignored the fear of my 9 year old memory, my 12 year old self now was screaming in panic from the back of my parents' van that I wasn't good enough.  After a few deep breaths, I suppressed my thoughts and feelings and focused on the task at hand.  I didn't have time to debate myself.  I had a job to do.

Looking down over the nose, I saw the man on the tug ready to push us away from the terminal.   After a quick exchange between him and the Captain, the plane lurched backward and the man told us that we were cleared to start our engines.  "Start number 2," the Captain, now calm and cool, instructed me. I reached up to the switch and began the start sequence.  All of the air in the airplane turned off and was diverted to the right engine.  Even with the door closed and a headset on, I could hear the low mechanical groan from the back of the airplane as the large jet engine began to spool up.  I have heard this sound hundreds of times before but this time, it was me who had commanded it.

The man on the tug disconnected from our airplane and retreated to the terminal leaving us all alone.  The Captain started the left engine and began to finally explain why he had been the way he was.  "The most important thing for us to do is leave on time.  That's why I had been pushing you.  You'd be surprised how many new hires take 40 minutes to do their initial flows.  You did fine.  Now, there is no need to rush.  We'll just take our time." As we lumbered out to the runway, he told me to go ahead and take over the radios.  I repeated our take-off clearance as we took the runway and watched as he pushed the thrust levers fully forward.  The engines roared to life and the airplane began racing toward the runway.  "Rotate" I called-out as we passed 140 mph.  The nose of the airplane lifted off the runway and suddenly we were airborne.  I reached up, lifted the landing gear and listen as it locked in place in the belly of the airplane.  Merely seconds later we were racing through the sky at 250 mph as we climbed in the direction of Chicago.

****

After a two-hour layover in Chicago, we headed out to Burlington, Vermont.  The landing and approach to Chicago had been very uneventful as the Captain pointed out some tips and pointers of how to fly the line.  As we waited for our plane to arrive from wherever it was coming from, I took some time to check my phone.  I had a few comments on the Facebook post from earlier in the day and reading them made me smile for the first time in almost 24 hours.  James Schannep, one of my best friends and author of a brand new Murder Mystery called MURDERED (yes, it's a shameless plug but it's a REALLY good book) told me that I should just tell everyone on the plane that it was my first time and how nervous I was because it would surely make everyone feel better.  Another one of my best friends, Richard, suggested that I tell the passengers that I used to fly nukes.  I felt like an idiot laughing almost too hard at the jokes on my page.

After everyone had deplaned in Vermont, I began my third iteration of the preflight panic of trying to get the airplane off the ground on time.  As I read through a checklist while we were pushing back from the gate, I indicated the autopilot was connected to the Captain's instruments.  "Wait, nah.  You're flying this leg."  He reconfigured the autopilot as I continued to read the checklist.  The first two legs were nice because pushing buttons on command, talking on the radios and reading checklists was easy and low-threat.  Now, it was MY turn.  

As we took the runway, I pushed the thrust levers all the way forward and the airplane began the now-familiar run.  The Captain called-out the rotate command and I pulled back on the yoke, lifting the nose of the ground.  It felt similar to the sim in ways but so foreign in others.  Perhaps it was because there were people on board.  I anticipated feeling like I was falling behind or on the verge of being out of control but, to my surprise, it felt natural.  I followed the twisting and turning course as I flew the airplane all the way to 10,000 feet before turning on the autopilot.  That was the easy part through.  The landing, now that is where most of my concern was placed.  

As we approached the runway in Chicago, I adjusted my seatbelt and sat up a little taller.  "Runway in sight" the Captain told me.  "Landing" I replied.  I called for the flaps to be extended and then the gear made a loud clunk as it locked in place. Racing toward the runway at well over 150 mph, the computer told me that we were 200 feet above the ground.  I slowly reduced the power.  At 100 feet, I began to level off and as the Captain called out 20 feet above the runway, I chopped the power to idle and held the wheels off the ground along with my breath.  I had the initial reaction to brace but  the wheels softly kissed the concrete and the airplane settled to ground.  

I couldn't help but smile as we pulled off the runway and the Captain, now a completely different person from our first interaction smiled and said, "Well, you can't complain about that one!"  The airplane pulled up to the gate and I ran a few more checklists while we were shutting down.  I had reached up to unlock the door and a few minutes later, a passenger shouted  to us "Good landing fellas!" as he walked out into the jetway.  My once white face now felt flush red.  The swing of emotions over the last 6 hours was borderline bipolar. 

We walked out of the airplane in Chicago and hitched a ride to Moline, Illinois where we would begin our next day at 5:15am.  The rest of the trip was incredibly uneventful.  I received many helpful tips and instruction over the next three days.  I even flew three of the four legs on the third day including one into Cleveland.  I'd been in that airport dozens of time but was a little excited to land there as a pilot.  I walked out in the D concourse there to have a sandwich and get some time to just relax a little.  If you would've asked me two years prior if I'd be the pilot landing at Cleveland-Hopkins, I would've laughed at you.  

On the last day, I flew both legs from Philly to DC and then from DC to St Louis.  As I walked through the St Louis terminal on Wednesday only 72 hours from when I began the trip, I felt a new sense of confidence unlike any that I'd felt in a long time.  I was no longer embarrassed to say I was a pilot.  In the past, it always felt like a front because, while I knew I was, I'd never really been paid to fly.  I'd only been paid to teach.  The Captain and I chatted and laughed as we walked through the terminal to the employee shuttle.  I walked taller and laughed harder than I had in years.  Even the kid in me smiled with giddiness knowing that he'd grown up to Live his Dream: to be a real life Airline Pilot.  Knowing that made me feel whole again as I rejoined the path I'd strayed off of 10 years ago.

I'll leave you with my favorite poem of all time and one that I've used many times to describe my life.

The Road Not Taken
By: Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

*If you were confused by my 9 and 12 year old comments, be sure to read the "Unfamiliar situations" entry from a few months ago.