Chapter Four – Part One
Keep Your Pants On, Please!

Wien Air Alaska had an assortment of interesting characters to fly with.  Some were openly hostile toward me, the second woman to fly for them.  Some were very curious but detached, and some went out of their way to make me feel welcome, knowing and not caring that many of their fellow pilots did not approve of their cordial behavior toward me.

One guy initially did his best to gross me out.  First it was just verbal, each sentence punctuated with as many four-letter words as could possibly be crammed in while still retaining some shred of meaning in whatever thought he was attempting to convey.

After that, it got a little more physical, with disgusting noises emanating from the most unexpected and mysterious body-parts.  It was incredible.

It didn’t have the desired effect, though.  Sometimes it made me gag, but mostly it made me giggle, and that is just not what this guy had in mind.  However, after this had gone on for almost three hours one evening on a flight from Seattle to Anchorage—with him doing and saying the most disgusting things and I just sitting there giggling— he turned around quite unexpectedly and announced, “You know, Getline, you’re okay.”  And he never hassled me again.  No more swearing—at least no more than anyone else—and no more deliberate and disgusting mystery noises.

On another flight, soon after I’d been deemed “okay,” after arriving in Portland, Oregon, where we were supposed to lay over, he surprised the copilot and me by inviting us to board his private Learjet and head for Chicago where he was “dining with clients.”  I had no idea what that meant but gave up trying to get any information out of this guy.  The copilot told me all he knew was about this captain was that he owned a gold mine near Fairbanks, was a multimillionaire and was generally disagreeable to his flight crews.  Once he liked someone, however, apparently he really, really liked them. 

So off we flew to Chicago.  The copilot and I had dinner on our own while he had his meeting, and then we flew back to Portland.  We all took turns flying the Learjet from the left seat, giving the jet’s captain a break.  I’d had some previous experience flying a Lear and, in fact, the very first time I ever saw a Lear and flew it, it was as Bill Lear’s guest.  He just happened to be passing through my home airfield near San Diego when I was a student pilot and invited me to fly with him after I gushed over his beautiful, sleek jet, not realizing I was gushing to the plane’s inventor.

Another Wien captain was legendary as well.  Once he was at a dinner meeting held at a posh restaurant in Washington, D.C.  The meeting had to do with the pilots’ union—ALPA (Air Line Pilots Association), and he was sitting at the head of the table.  The sommelier reportedly approached him and showed him a bottle of wine.  The cork was removed and this pilot made a big show of sniffing it, all very properly.  He swirled the wine in the glass, allowing it to breathe.  Then, instead of drinking from the glass, he very deliberately set it down, took the bottle from the surprised  wine steward and took a swig, giving a great big “Aaaahhhh!” and a grin when he was done, wiping his had across his mouth and giving a thumbs up sign to the startled dinner guests.  Of course he bought a second bottle for the table.  He just liked doing stuff like that.

This was Captain Ron Wood, and he and I were to fly together many times.   He was one of the pilots who told me he thought it was really admirable that I’d made it this far in what had been a profession closed to women until very recently, and that he hoped his daughter would pursue her dreams as I had pursued mine.

We used to sing duets on our flights.  The copilot sometimes joined in, depending upon who was it was for any given flight.  The ones who didn’t join in seemed to endure our musical interludes with stoic patience, never venturing any criticism.  Well, not often, anyway.

Ron had seen “Evita” any number of times.  I’d never seen it but had the tape and knew several of the songs by heart, as did he, and this is mostly what we sang.  He’s not the only pilot I ever flew with who liked to sing while flying, but I sang with him more than with any other pilot before or since.

Although Wien’s first woman was a very well-liked Alaskan and had set at least some precedent for women, I was the first female to fly as part of their three-pilot B-727 crews.  Earlier, the largest airplane they’d flown had just two pilots—the B-737.  I was the flight engineer on the B-727.  The flight engineer sits sideways facing a panel of dials and gauges, managing the fuel, hydraulics, air conditioning and other systems.