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For years young women with mile-high dreams and
eyes turned skyward have flown planes in a professional capacity: as
stewardesses. But one woman wasn’t content to merely ride the plane; she
wanted to fly it, too!
When Meryl Getline decided, at the age of twenty,
that she was going to be an airline pilot, she didn’t know there was no
such thing as women airline pilots. So how did this young woman, prone to airsickness, get to be
a captain for a major airline? Not easily! But difficult challenges
always makes for the best reading, and that’s just the case here.
Meryl Getline’s new memoir, The World At My Feet: The
True (and Sometimes Hilarious) Adventures of a Lady Airline
Captain shares the unlikely account of this young woman’s adventures
from the time she was eleven years old and just had to fly, through her
travels to Austria, Israel, France, Russia, Iran, Mexico and Alaska.
What would she do when she discovered the Russian Red Army train she was
on was terminating in East Berlin at three in the morning, with no
transportation available over the border to West Berlin?
Read how the US Army had no idea what it was in for
when she enlisted, how a careless camel caused raised eyebrows at an
important military inspection, and why she was wearing green tennis
shoes when everyone around her was clad in spit-shined combat boots.
With The World At My Feet, readers will thrill to learn
how Meryl improvised when she was stranded in Dallas, Texas, with four
lady army buddies, and had to get all of them, including herself, back
for morning formation on base in Alabama. Read how she once wound up
outside the airplane she was flying solo, hanging onto a wing 10,000
above the white-capped, freezing waters of the Gulf of Alaska! Laugh
along with the guys on the Goodyear Blimp when they play a most
embarrassing joke on her—and much, much more!
Growing up in San Diego, California, author Meryl
Getline overcame airsickness to go on to become the first female to ever
get a DC-10 Type (Captain) Rating before being hired as a pilot for
a major airline in 1985. She is still an active captain for a major airline today. |