EAA Sport Aviation - October 2011

still working (flying), presumably to see what airline-retired life is like. It’s like this: burgers, beer, and lies. It’s a good life.

To be fully accepted into the
group you have to have shed

Air Oregon was purchased by Horizon

Air, founded by the enigmatic and lovable

some ice and seen lightning

Milt Koult. It’s a regional airline that survived, grew, and did well. Horizon was then purchased by Alaska Airlines.

inside a thunderstorm at night.

So, from being hired by an airline headquartered in a double-wide trailer after a five-minute interview while dressed in a smelly National Guard flight suit, I worked six months as a copilot and 25-1/2 years as a captain for three different airline companies and never missed a paycheck. All I had to change was uniforms (and I still have a closet full of those). Typical? Maybe. But I ended up having a lot of fun.

That’s the fraternal bond.

What I’m saying is that the guys around the table cut their “flying teeth” in the Pacific Northwest, flying into all manner of coastal, mountain, and windy flatland airports. They stared down many a thunderstorm, shed lots of ice, landed on many snow-covered runways, and did a thousand non-precision approaches

following a radial that took them up canyons below the ridge tops so that they could break out at 300 feet AGL to land to the tune of a 30-knot crosswind. And they’ve been No. 10 in the holding stack at Seattle and Los Angeles and Salt Lake and Denver. They flew on lots of clear and beautiful days when the Pacific Northwest mountain ranges shone like snow-covered gems. All of that is a part of their flying soul. In other words, they’ve been there and done that in the airline business. But guess what? That’s not what they talked about when they first sat down.

The first thing they talked about—after the initial insults, anyway, like, “Geez, you look older’n dirt!”—was their health: hearing, eyes, heart, melanoma. That stuff is a “big deal” to pilots; it’s all about the