This is two, possibly three stories in one.
I’ll start with the back story. Ken is an air force brat. His Dad was a pilot with the RAF during World War II, earning among other honours, the Distinguished Flying Cross. After the war, he and Mom married and eventually moved to Canada. Ken was five or six when they moved here.
In Canada, Dad eventually joined the RCAF, again as a pilot and did all sorts of things, lived all over Canada including several years of service at Four Wing, Baden Baden, Germany. They lived in such exciting places…Gimli (where snow blew into the hosue), Moose Jaw, Saskatoon, North Bay, Winnipeg Beach (complete with outdoor plumbing). They were posted to Winnipeg when we met.
Dad was an accomplished man and among other air force assignments, wrote many of their training manuals. One of his roles was as Chief Instrument Check Pilot or something like that, which meant that no one, NO ONE could fly without his ok.
Sitting listening to the family talking of their air force adventure memories opened a new world for me. I’d almost always lived in Saskatoon and my Dad always worked in the same city we lived in. My Dad ran his own mechanical contracting business, so holidays and travel were not part of our lives. But Ken had been all sorts of places and done all sorts of things. And so had his Dad.
I had many treasured evenings hearing stories of a world I could only imagine.
But I have one specific memory that struck me today. One of Dad’s favourite memories was during his time as chief instrument check pilot. I don’t know how often pilots had to test and requalify. I expect regularly. Dad talked about the time he was testing a multi-starred general. Dad was sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, waiting for the general to arrived. Dad had already done his checks. The general’s car arrived, he jumped out of the car and got into the jet’s cockpit, strapped in and said “Right Jock, let’s go.”
Dad said “You fail.”
“What? The test flight hasn’t even started.”
“Your first responsibility as pilot is to check your plane. Yourself. You don’t delegate that responsibility. You don’t skip this step. Ever.”
Fast forward a decade or two from hearing the memory, five decades from when it happened.
We’re sitting in a sushi restaurant in Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, enjoying our pre-boarding lunch. I’m facing into the airport, Ken is facing out onto the runway where planes are loading and unloading.
“I think I just saw the captain of that Delta flight walking around the runway. He looked like he was doing a pre-flight check.”
I twisted around in my seat and sure enough, there’s a man in a crew jacket over a blue uniform with stripes on his sleeve. We watched as he walked around the plane checking, looking close up, then walking several paces out and doing a distance check.
It takes us back to the kitchen table in Dornoch talking about pre-flight checks and how the captain always does his own. Always.
Fast forward a couple of hours. We’re now sitting at gate G-3 waiting for our boarding to be called. We’re facing out the window and looking at the plane. And there he is…doing a walk-about and doing his own pre-flight check, our flight’s pilot. doing his preflight check. His OWN preflight check. In all our years of flying, we have never seen this before…or more correctly, we have never looked out at the right moment to notice it.
It takes a great deal of faith to step into an aluminum cigar tube that weighs, heaven knows how much, but is going to lift off the ground and hurtle you through the air to your destination. It’s a kind of magic. Oh, I understand the science of flight. I’ve taken university level physics (and failed), but I do understand the science of flight, I marvel at it, and I get on planes at any given opportunity. But it takes faith in the science (and magic) of flight and the abilities of the flight crew to take that flight.
Ken and I hold hands during landings and take offs. Have done for decades.
Seeing this pilot doing his own pre-flight check as a matter of routine, touching, feeling, looking.
Well, it gave me huge faith.