Sky Masterson

From Destination Tempest

Those who have nothing to prove don’t fly in the mountains for long. When they realize the courage necessary to out-think and out-fly heaving winds for a living, they find an excuse to change airlines—or professions. They say they must leave—“for better pay”; or “to live near family”; or “because my wife wants me to study law”. But those who live by the mountain winds know where home is. They don’t see others as quitters; indeed, it is just as well to leave the mountains to those who hunger for the satisfaction of doing the undoable rather than work alongside timid men.

In a crowd of ordinary aviators, it is the mountain flyer who is the awkward one. He is quiet, a world apart from the rest. He keeps his mouth closed and his ears open, listening to those who speak of rain and heavy traffic at LaGuardia, O’Hare, and San Francisco, waiting in endless lines of ramp congestion. What he might add in conversation would go unheard. Because what he knows is unthinkable; his words are perceived as lies, or stories merely intended to add spice to conversation. Certainly no ordinary airline pilot would subject himself to such a burden. So he stands quietly, listening to the man who “put her down in a tremendous 25 knot crosswind in Hong Kong”—and lights another cigarette.

He is the loner who balks at ceremony when he finally earns his airline wings—but something dies inside him when he loses them on his 65^th birthday. He wonders why; and then he wonders no more. When he earns his wings, the unspoken things begin. It becomes imperative to make little of what others think are astronomical. He is a pilot of a big airplane; he takes hundreds of trusting people into perilous weather environments over impossible terrain, and then sets them safely down again on a short, icy stretch of pavement, all the while continuing to fight the winds. Everything is a big deal, so nothing is; nothing must be important or else the monstrosity of the responsibility would become overwhelming. He bounces it in, big deal; engines fail, big deal; near miss with another airliner, big deal; blown tire, big deal; lost hydraulics, big deal. It’s enough to make an ordinary person curl into the fetal position and cry out for their mother.

Pinned-on wings are the beginning of the ‘unspokens’, erasing thoughts that make sense out of dire situations too overwhelming to conceive. Therefore, no emergency is a big deal. If the reality of the situation is contemplated while he or she is at the controls, the overwhelming magnitude of what is happening—and what they are doing—would be debilitating. He gets his wings, the single greatest achievement of his lifetime; lavishes himself with a bottle of cheap beer; then he checks in on the phone the night before his morning flight on ‘The Line.’

 From Pilots of the Line