Flygirl Read online

  Sunshine lit up the first fifteen feet of the gleaming hangar floor. The sound of her pumps reverberated through the huge space. Step by step, the Astral took form. The museum-like setting reminded Tris of places she’d visit as a child. Look, but don’t touch.

  “Be careful, it’s slippery.” Zorn’s voice brought her back to the moment. He pointed down, and it took her a minute to realize that the danger of slipping was due to the immaculately polished concrete surface. At the commuter, the only reason she’d take a header in a hangar was that a sloppy mechanic had spilled oil or hydraulic fluid.

  A couple of guys in work shirts with the Tetrix emblem stood by the Astral. Their uniforms had the names “Brad” and “Chip” embroidered on them next to the Tetrix trademark, a crane which symbolized the sprawling construction projects the company spearheaded all over the world. The men stopped their conversation when she stepped close enough to overhear.

  “Hi.” She waved at them as she walked behind Zorn and Willett up the Astral’s airstairs. They nodded, wide-eyed.

  The sun reflected off the gold hardware on the front galley cabinets as Tris climbed into the jet. It was awkward at first, the three of them in the narrow vestibule. But Zorn and Willett squeezed out of the way and pointed Tris toward the cockpit.

  Tris inhaled the sharp scent of dust and metal at the cockpit threshold as she scanned the intricate switch panels. She heard the hum of avionics; saw the red, green, and amber indicator lights. She raised her hand and let it hover above the switch panel. Heat rose from the metal plate that covered a complex web of powerful electronic cables just inches away.

  “Check out the cabin.” Zorn smiled like a little kid. He waved his hand toward leather recliners, a couch, and what looked like a dining table. Opening the galley cabinets, he revealed a stack of embossed bone china, sterling silver flatware, and real crystal glasses.

  The three of them stood in the Astral for only a few minutes. Tris couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d finally been invited to the penthouse. But just to look, not to stay. Not yet.

  With the tour over, the three of them filed back into the office. Willett said goodbye first and walked away. Tris waved to Ann-Marie as Zorn escorted her to the door.

  “Nice meeting you, Patricia,” Zorn said formally. “We’ll give you a call in about two weeks and let you know. Fly safe.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Zorn. This was a thrill for me,” she said and nodded toward the hangar. They shook hands again. Once she turned away from him, she broke into a broad, self-satisfied grin. It went well.

  She pulled out the keys to the Corolla. Just two years ago, Tris taught new flight students to fly single-engine airplanes no more powerful than her car. The summers she’d spent flying around the airport, practicing takeoffs and landings in ninety-degree heat, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with a sweating student or her own instructor. And early winter mornings, kneeling on the ramp, checking the aircraft’s landing gear in subfreezing temperatures with snow and slush all around her. Just to build flight time. Time, like an advanced degree, was the experience essential to professional ascent.

  That time brought her here. She visualized the switches, buttons, and levers that made the Astral fly close to the speed of sound.

  This was why.

  Seven

  “YOU’VE GOT THE job.” Zorn called Tris three days after her interview. “It’s yours if you want it.”

  Tris hadn’t moved since she’d hung up the phone. She’d accepted his offer on the spot, but she didn’t feel elation or the thrill of success.

  They picked a start date, and Zorn had already assigned a training captain—an ex-military pilot, Ed something. She couldn’t remember his last name.

  Tris respected military pilots. Lots of the guys she flew with at Clear Sky started in the military. She’d even considered ROTC when she was in high school. Her mother had discouraged her, as usual. “Oh, Patricia, young girls don’t go into the military. That’s a man’s work,” she’d said.

  Dissuasion was her mother’s predictable reaction to anything vaguely outside the norm. Her slavish devotion to the known, the safe, made sense. The death of Tris’s father turned her into a single mother, something she was never cut out to be. Until getting remarried, she supported the two of them on the small payment from his life insurance policy and her salary as a cashier at the local Shop-N-Go.

  It was assumed that Tris would go to college, but no one in her family had money to pay for tuition. Tris worked summers stocking shelves at the same Shop-N-Go and took out loans to attend a small liberal arts university near her home. Most of her friends majored in education, so she did, too.

  There were no teaching jobs available in Pittston after graduation. If she’d moved closer to Exeter she could have found work easily in an urban school. Instead, she accepted an academic scholarship to enroll in graduate school. She’d earn more teaching with a master’s, she’d reasoned. It couldn’t hurt.

  Then a college friend received his private pilot’s license and offered to take her for a ride. They toured the flat landscape of the southern tip of the state when he dared Tris to take the yoke. “Just for a few minutes,” he said. At once, Tris experienced an indescribable elation as she guided the airplane around the sky.

  As soon as they parked the plane, Tris went to sign up for a lesson. After her first hour at the controls of the tiny yellow and white single-engine Piper Warrior, she was hooked. Tris went directly from the airplane post-flight inspection to the head of the flight school’s office to talk about training options, costs, and how much time it would take her to get her license.

  Flying became the dream she’d always had, a reality so urgent it crashed through all of her ‘some days’ or ‘maybes.’ Something about flying said, “Go. Go now.” She wasn’t looking for a new career, but it found her anyway.

  Then the doubts surfaced. Flight training was expensive. She had no savings and hadn’t had a steady teaching job since she earned her degree. Then there was her master’s, which was more than half finished. The real-world consequences of a career change made Tris crawl back into her head and push thoughts of flying aside. She finished her master’s and moved to Exeter. A series of teaching jobs each ended in bitterness over funding and layoffs. And more time passed.

  One afternoon, Tris was grading papers in the teacher’s lounge. She heard the high-pitched whine of jet engines overhead. She went to the window and watched from below as an airliner descended into Exeter Airport.

  It wasn’t her grandfather that she thought of. Tris saw her mother, smoking a cigarette at their green Formica kitchen table after a long day on her feet at the cash register.

  Tris surveyed the open room in the teacher’s lounge. One colleague ate her lunch out of a Tupperware container. Another worked on a lesson plan. Tris would never be satisfied living her life in such confined spaces. She had to expand her universe, become a piece of the sky instead of someone who just looked up at it in wonder.

  She would risk failure and mistake—but not regret.

  For almost two years, Tris taught full-time and studied at night. She’d spend every weekend at the airport training to earn her Certified Flight Instructor rating.

  Teaching people to fly was nothing like the classroom she came from. Her regular hours morphed into the extremes of the business day, first thing in the morning until long after five. Flight training was expensive—Tris knew that well. Her students were no longer high-schoolers, but busy professionals at the top of their careers who had to squeeze flight lessons in between meetings and business trips.

  Tris had to fly on her students’ schedules, or she wouldn’t fly at all. Every day, she woke at dawn. After a cup of coffee and some breakfast, she made the forty-five-minute drive to Westin Airport, with its one runway and narrow taxiway that had grass growing out of the cracks.

  A leaky trailer perched at the end of a long dirt road was home to Westin Flight School. After early training flights, Tris would wedge herself
into a worn leather chair and read a book until lessons picked up again in the late afternoon. After each long, stop-start day, Tris trudged home, slowed by fatigue, sometimes long after dark.

  After a year, Clear Sky hired her. She was an airline pilot! But the pay was terrible. At the end of the month, her take-home pay was less per hour than what she earned as a flight instructor, which was even less than her miserly teacher’s salary. Another trade-off, as Tris leaped up the experience ladder flying Clear Sky’s fleet of multiengine turboprop aircraft.

  And now she had Tetrix. It was a coup, she knew it. First, it was about getting the job. Done. But the great money, benefits, and five-star hotels came with a catch. She had to qualify in the Astral, to learn it and fly it. Until the second she hung up the phone with Zorn, she hadn’t focused on the depth of the challenge—or what it would mean if she failed. Another training event like the one at Clear Sky and that would be it. Career over. She’d never make it up to him.

  It was game time. She had to win.

  Eight

  DANNY STOOD ON the small concrete patio outside Tris’s living room. Her vertical blinds were open and the curtains pushed to the sides of the sliding glass door. He watched Tris finger the edges of a framed photograph of Bron, one they took on a trip to Barbados. Danny remembered it well; he’d covered Bron’s schedule so Bron could take that vacation with her. Danny still had the unopened bottle of rum Bron brought back to thank him.

  Danny had said he’d stop by at some point today. Tris expected him to enter from the patio since it was a shorter walk from the apartment complex parking lot. Sometimes he’d find her sitting outside waiting for him.

  Today she was in the living room, hunched over on that old couch staring at her ex-boyfriend’s photo. Her hair wasn’t combed, and she had on a faded Clear Sky T-shirt and baggy sweatpants. Those fuzzy slippers she wore, shaped like the head of a moose with antlers, were her favorites.

  Just the way she sat on that couch, the way she’d surrounded it with photos of him, of them, reminded Danny of how she and Bron became a couple. It was Bron’s old couch, one he posted for sale on the crew room bulletin board. Tris and Bron both marked the beginning of their relationship as the day Tris bought, and Bron delivered, this piece of secondhand furniture.

  Danny started to feel like a voyeur, so he rapped on the slider.

  “Oh my god,” Tris exclaimed when she heard the quick taps on the glass. “Hey! Way to sneak up on someone!” She let him in.

  “You looked lost in thought, Flygirl. What’s up?”

  She smiled. “I got Tetrix. I. Got. Tetrix. Can you believe it?”

  Danny had a flash of jealousy. Oh, he could believe it. In his head, he heard that old refrain, how much easier it was for women to get flying jobs these days. But he would never say that to Tris. He knew how hard she worked just to get this far and what she’d overcome. She was a great pilot, a great person. He didn’t really want a corporate job anyway.

  “All right then! This calls for a special celebration. We might even have to splurge on imported beer!” They both laughed. On a commuter pilot’s salary—even a captain’s—whatever beer they found on sale at the local grocery store was the toast of choice.

  “I have two Molson’s in the fridge. I’ve been saving them for just such an occasion.” Tris bounced toward her tiny kitchen. Danny was thrilled to see her so happy. He would miss her in the crew room and the cockpit. They enjoyed each other’s company on the road without too much tension. He simply loved being around her and he’d wanted to ask her out for a long time. But she was Bron’s girl.

  By the time Tris brought the beers back—in frosted glasses!—he’d removed his uniform tie and undid the top two buttons of his pilot shirt. He sat on the couch and lit a cigarette. Danny offered her one and she gladly took it. A secret they shared, one only Bron knew. This was a big event, and a smoke was called for.

  He inhaled and blew a series of smoke rings. “So, tell me about the interview. What’s the deal with the two bosses?”

  “No clue. I didn’t want to ask. Brian Zorn, the chief, said almost nothing for the longest time. He just took notes and played with something on his desk. And he asked me some things toward the end, basic questions.”

  She entertained Danny for a while with some interview details, but he only half-listened. He wished she would just stay at Clear Sky.

  “How many others did they interview? Who’d you beat out for the job?”

  “No idea.” She took a long drag.

  “Any clue what the other pilots in the department are like?” Danny had heard all the same stories as Tris about corporate pilots. They were widely considered to be second tier to the airline guys—by the airline guys, anyway.

  Clouds of smoke hung between them. “Nope. I just met the chief and the manager. And the woman behind the front desk. I know there are three other pilots. Six total now, with me.” Her lips broadened into a full smile, which made her eyes close. He’d better distract himself before something started to rise.

  He refocused on their conversation. “Ok. So tell me about the Astral. Did you get to see it?”

  “Oh yeah. It’s awesome. Really sleek wing,” she began and gave Danny an animated review of what sounded like a dream machine.

  “So,” he said, “what’s the training plan for you?” That caught her attention, as he knew it would. She frowned and looked at him out of the corner of her eye.

  “I don’t know, actually.” She fiddled with a loose thread on her sweatpants. “I asked when I would upgrade to captain. They didn’t say specifically, but I came away with the impression it would take less than a year.”

  “Upgrade in a year,” he said. “Actual upgrade to captain, or just a type rating? They can get you the type, the qualification, without giving you command, right?”

  It was one thing to fly the plane to the standards set for captains by the FAA. That’ll earn a type rating. No pilot could fly as captain without it. But every pilot had to show the judgment required to be pilot-in-command before being given the responsibility. “We’re talkin’ about lives here, man,” he and Bron would say to upgrade candidates at Clear Sky. Bron believed that the ability to command was the true measure of a pilot.

  “Maybe six months to a type rating. Captain, pilot-in-command, they said, ‘Depends, Patricia.’” She lowered her chin and deepened her voice, mimicking one of the Tetrix guys.

  Danny just smiled. During their initial training, Tris was an amazing supporting player. Danny called her Radar O’Reilly, after the character from M*A*S*H who always knew what would happen before it did. She had trouble flying the airplane at first, but slowly, her skills came around, one maneuver at a time.

  Yet no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t master the V1 cut—the nightmare scenario when an airplane’s engine failed on takeoff. In that life-or-death moment, there was no time for thought—only motion—and it had to be right. If not, in the simulator, the airplane pretended to crash. In the real world, people died.

  That maneuver ate up the most experienced pilots, not because it was physically hard; every pilot he’d ever met had the strength in their hands and feet to handle it, including Tris. He thought it might be a ‘head’ thing. Maybe the sheer gravity of the situation; the stakes of the moment caused some pilots to temporarily lose their minds.

  Time after time as the instructor failed an engine on takeoff in the simulator, Tris froze. Danny would look over at her and grin, anything to show he was on her side and wanted her to succeed. She’d smile like she understood. And they’d try it again. But at the critical moment, she was a little too slow, a little late. The simulated runway would slide off to the side as the ‘aircraft’ hurtled into some building or fence. And the screen ahead would go black.

  Danny had seen new hires give up and walk away over the years, go back to jobs in the simple airplanes they already knew they could fly. But not this girl. After every screwup, she’d nod and say, “Let’s set it up aga
in.”

  She studied and practiced the maneuver over and over again. He counted the hours she sat at a cardboard reconstruction of the cockpit, running through procedures, touching the one-dimensional pictures of flight controls and power levers, whispering appropriate commands.

  Tris practiced silently, her hands and feet moving as they would in the airplane. In their crew car when they drove to dinner. In the grocery store when they stopped to pick up food. There, shopping carts became rudders, which she would thrust forward one way or the other depending on whether Danny said “right” or “left engine failure.” Fresh carrots became power levers. The cheese display was the instrument panel.

  Some of the other guys in the training cycle made fun of her behind her back. “Miles of shrapnel,” they called her after the detritus of a crash. The airline pushed her to take a check ride, which of course she failed the first time. And the second.

  Clear Sky wanted to cut her loose after the second bust. Luckily, the head of training was a friend of Danny’s. He begged them to give her one more chance. And then it clicked. Tris passed her check ride and went to work as a regular line pilot.

  But, she never forgot. She thought about little else before the interview. Over and over again, Danny challenged her with questions about training, things the interviewers might ask. And with each practice answer, Tris became more confident.

  “Did they ask about training?”

  Tris hesitated. “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “I told them I passed.”

  “Really?” Danny was surprised. Tris never shied away from what happened.

  “I did pass. Eventually,” she said and looked up at him in a way that begged him to move on. But this was too important. The record of her check ride busts was out there.

  “Do you think they know?”

  “They didn’t let on if they did. No, I don’t think so.” And then, after a few more seconds of silence, she added, “Danny, I thought about telling them. And then, there was this moment, you know, when I was sure they were going to ask. But they didn’t. They just didn’t. And I thought, hey, it’s behind me. That’s where I should leave it.”