Chapter One - The Rocking Chair
(Part One)

 
It was a dream come true; finally, eight years after my first rejection by this company, I was offered a job at my airline of choice—United Airlines.  What a wonderful career it would be.  My entire adult life, starting at age 20 for all practical purposes, had been lived with but one goal in mind:  To fly not just for a major airline, but this major airline—United.  This airline had everything I wanted.  It had the routes and the planes I wanted to fly.  It had a large presence in Hawaii, and I just love the beach.  It even had a look I admired with its patriotic red, white and blue airplanes.  The potential for reaching my dream, which was to fly a B-747 as a captain, was at last within my grasp. 

However, this was to be a stunning example of colossally bad timing.  I was still somewhat in shock over the demise of my previous airline, Wien Air Alaska (Wien being a family name and pronounced “Ween”), just a few months prior.  United was my dream job, but in the winter of 1985, when I was invited to Denver for the interview process, a strike was brewing.  If the worst happened, which was a strike nobody seemed to think would actually come to pass, I didn’t want to even think about what it would be like to be seen as a strikebreaker and blackballed in some circles, always defensive. 

I had seen the result at Wien, whose strike had ended a few years before I was hired there in 1981.  It never went away.  Pilots can be as stubborn, close-minded and completely irrational as any group that ever was.  They don’t care if your mother is dying, your children are starving and you’re living in a box under a bridge.  Cross a picket line and your life will never be what passes for normal again.  Not ever.  These radicals—and thankfully not all pilots are like this—make the Teamsters look Girl Scouts.
 
I remember one conversation with the Principal Operating FAA Inspector for Wien.  He was a large, burly guy and was riding along in the cockpit from Seattle to Anchorage on what was to be one of our last flights before we finally bit the dust and the company liquidated.  “Never gonna’ happen” he said confidently, referring to a possible strike at United.    Two of the three of us pilots in the cockpit had applied to United before word was out about a possible strike in the works. 

“Why not?” asked Ron, my captain.  I was flying copilot in a B-727.

“Because United will never, ever allow it.  They’d never get enough pilots to replace the strikers and it would be enough to destroy United as a company.”

“You sure?” I asked.  I wanted to believe what he was saying but part of me didn’t.

“Of course I’m sure,” he said confidently.  Just go about your business and get yourself hired.  By that time, this company will either be gone for good or, if by some miracle it survives, you can decide to stay if you want.  But you’d be smarter to leave.

I had no intention of staying if I was hired by any other airline—especially United.  It wasn’t because I didn’t love Alaska, because I did.  But Wien was so shaky everyone knew the end was near.  We’d already had a few shutdowns due to money just plain running out, and nobody was fooling anybody now.  We were flying on borrowed time and it was time to get the heck out.  At least the timing was good for our pilots, as several of the majors seemed to be hiring.

My thoughts wandered back to 1977 when I was first called to be interviewed by United.  I was flying for a corporation based just south of Los Angeles when the letter came, inviting me to an interview in Chicago.  I was almost breathless as I was shown to my first-class seat on the luxurious B-747, my first time ever on this beautiful aircraft.

We landed in Chicago more softly than I would have believed an airplane this big could ever land, “like a butterfly landing on hot coals,” an expression I would learn years later.  I followed the instructions on my interview invitation and wound up at the World Headquarters of this mammoth company near Chicago where my interview was to be held.

I didn’t have to wait long before a secretary came and got me.  She had a peculiar look on her face but I didn’t know what it meant.  I was soon to find out.

My interview lasted less than five minutes; they hadn’t realized I was a woman even though it was plainly stated on my application.  My qualifications made me look like a male applicant on paper, with a few thousand hours including a healthy amount of multi-engine time.  I’d checked the box showing I had Army Vietnam Era veteran status and had a helicopter rating with hundreds of hours of rotary wing time.  My whole application suggested I was a guy. 

The box was checked indicating I was a female, but they’d all missed it.  At that time female pilots with enough qualifications to even apply to a major airline were extremely rare.  Even today, women make up only around ten percent of the major airline pilot population worldwide.  To me this sounds enormous, since the figure was zero percent for all practical purposes until 1973, when Bonnie Tiburzi was hired by American Airlines.  (She wrote a book about her own experiences, called “Takeoff!”)  Back then, women pilots were all but unheard of, although some of the other majors had a few by this time.  United wasn’t one of them—not yet.

I was unceremoniously escorted out and put on the next plane back to LAX.  I felt humiliated, crushed and defeated, even more so when United hired their first women and minorities early in 1978, just months after they threw me out.  When I called to ask, “Hey, guys, what about me?” I was told it was “standard policy” to put rejected pilots back into the hiring pool for a year, no matter what the reason was for being turned down—even discrimination.

This should have been a warning to me about how large companies operate, how insensitive and insensible they can be.  I waited out the year, but by then layoffs were once again looming and I did not get a second chance.