Chapter 1

Having reached the flight controller’s instructed altitude of ten thousand feet, Captain Jeff Mitchell waited for further instructions. Upon receiving them, the first officer acknowledged the instructions, changed the radio frequency, and signed on to the new flight controller. The new controller acknowledged Jeff’s flight and approved a turn to the requested heading and ascension to the requested altitude. The first officer inputted this information into the automatic pilot, which would take the plane up to thirty-seven thousand feet and put them on a heading for LAX.

Jeff could now lean back in his seat and relax. Everything was in place for what should have been an uneventful flight to Los Angeles. There were storms over Kansas, but they were forecast to dissipate and not be a problem. While Jeff was watching the instruments and listening to the flight controllers, thoughts were running through his mind, with the primary one being about his life to date.

Jeff had taken the Air Force ROTC route at the University of Illinois at Champaign. His preference was to be a large airframe pilot as opposed to a fighter pilot when he reported after graduation from college for active duty. His preference as to which planes he would be trained to fly was acknowledged and approved. He was trained to be the pilot of an AWACS plane. He had progressed and became one of the youngest command pilots as a First Lieutenant of a Boeing AWACS plane.

His thoughts all along had been to make the Air Force a career, but that didn’t happen since he decided to leave the Air Force and become a commercial airline pilot. It wasn’t an easy decision for him to leave the Air Force, but it was one he thought he needed to make. The main reason for his leaving the Air Force occurred when Jeff was questioned during his annual performance evaluation why he still had the rank of captain and had not been promoted to the rank of major given his time in grade. He was told that his promotion was delayed because he didn’t have a master’s degree. This was a shock and news to him since this was the first time he was told he needed to have that advanced degree for promotion. At his age and his stage in life, he had no plans to go back to school to get that degree.

Jeff didn’t have any problems with his application to become a commercial airline pilot. The type of aircraft he flew, along with his many hours of flight time, led the first major airline to apply to hire him. He had progressed rapidly from a first officer to a captain and was qualified to fly several Boeing-built planes, from the 737 to the 767. Today, he was the captain of a Boeing 737-800 flying from O’Hare to Los Angeles. This plane had started the day at O’Hare and had gone to Miami, and now it was back in Chicago. Jeff became this plane’s captain when the plane came back to O’Hare. After landing at LAX, about an hour later, Jeff would be piloting this plane back to O’Hare.

Jeff was based in Chicago and had bid on flying this route. For him, it was close to putting in an eight-hour work day, but because of the pre-flight preparation and non-flying time, it made for a longer work day. While Jeff did have some seniority, it wasn’t enough for him to be able to get flight assignments that left and returned at a reasonable time to O’Hare. He had been fortunate to get this route for a month with its scheduled takeoff time and doubted he could get this route again next month, but he would bid on flying this same route.

The routes he had been assigned to fly were usually those that went out to the West Coast and back. His present assignment was a flight that left at two in the afternoon, which had him back at O’Hare at close to midnight if everything went right. He didn’t care for the overnight flights to Europe because of jetlag. The life expectancy of a commercial airline pilot was below the national average, and it was Jeff’s personal opinion that jetlag was the reason for it. His personal thought was that jet lag played havoc on the human body.

Flying his currently assigned route would give him the required seventy-eight hours of flying time for the month. This current monthly route was front-end loaded, which meant his assigned flying time for the route was concentrated at the beginning of the month. This gave him considerable free time towards the end of the month.

Jeff was forty-five years old and single. He had let the airline know that he was available to fly when he wasn’t scheduled to fly. Having no wife or family enabled him to be this flexible, and he was never bored when he was flying. This additional flight time also enabled him to increase the size of his paycheck. Flying these additional hours had him often coming close to flying the maximum of one hundred hours a month a commercial airline pilot was allowed to fly.

He was doing what extra flying he could to build up a retirement nest egg. He wasn’t sure what he would do when he reached the mandatory retirement age of sixty-five, but whatever it was, he wanted to be sure he had sufficient funds to do it. One of his thoughts was to purchase a private plane and pilot it to see this country and our neighbors, both north and south. He was single, and it would be nice if he had a female companion with him to do this flying, but so far he hadn’t found anyone he would want to be his life’s partner.

That is not to say Jeff wasn’t looking to find Ms. Right, he was, but so far he hadn’t found her. While most of the flight attendants he met were personable, there weren’t many who attracted him. Many of the attractive flight attendants were already married and were working flight schedules that had them ending up at their home base after doing a day’s work. The majority of the unmarried attractive attendants were divorced, and he wondered who was at fault for the divorce. He wasn’t being judgmental, but he knew people would say he was thinking that way.

Laughing to himself, he knew he wasn’t going to find a 35-year-old virgin. He didn’t want one; he just wanted to find someone who was compatible with him and the right fit for him.

His first officer on this flight to LAX was Emily Radish. She was in her mid-thirties, and he would say she was above average in her looks. She was eager to learn and advance, and yet at the same time, he noted that she was no pushover. She was quick to respond if she thought something wasn’t right. That was a trait a good pilot thought she should have, and she did have it.

Part of his duties as a captain, he acknowledged, was to have Emily become the best she could be as a pilot. This would be a benefit to her and everyone else who flew with her. To that end, he was doing what he could to give her some on-the-job training. On this flight, after she set the automatic pilot, he told her she had control and it was her duty to fly the plane for the remainder of the flight to LAX. He said he was just going to sit back and relax.

She would act as the command pilot, and he would act as the first officer. Handling the flight, speed, descent, and landing were all going to be her responsibility. He would be doing the checklist and the communications. He initially saw the smile on her face when he said this to her, and then he noticed her smile change to a look of determination.