Over the course of my 12 years as an airline pilot I had the opportunity to fly with many different crew members. Contrary to what many people believe, airline pilots don’t often fly with the same people. You may fly with a particular crew member only once during your entire career. Delta Airlines, for example, has more than 16,000 pilots. That results in countless possible pilot combinations. Occasionally I flew with the same pilot for a whole month, but those instances were few and far between.

Flying  with another pilot for just one trip could be a true blessing when that pilot was overbearing or annoying or they smelled bad. I flew with pilots who never stopped talking and somehow those pilots always managed to talk about things I had no interest in. I flew with pilots who never spoke a word aside from required checklists. Either of those examples makes for a very long four-day trip and a deep desire to never fly with that person again.

I also flew with many pilots who made a four-day trip a real joy. Some were great conversationalists who told amazing stories. Others had a wonderful sense of humor, so I spent most of the trip laughing. And none of those pilots smelled bad. One pilot I flew with on several occasions stands out among all the others. I enjoyed flying with him as much as anyone I ever flew with, if not more. And I really shouldn’t have because every time we flew together something went wrong. Every. Damn. Time. 

I’ll call him Steve for the sake of privacy. Five minutes after meeting Steve, we had our first problem. The first leg of our first trip together was a deadhead, which means we would simply be riding in the back of the airplane with all the regular paying passengers. It’s just a way to get pilots from one place to another. Steve and I arrived at our gate at the same time. We shook hands and introduced ourselves. He told me his name and I immediately forgot it because that is what I do every time I meet someone. Then the gate agent informed us that our gate had changed, so we needed to hurry to the new gate. Easy enough, one would think. 

Most pilots walk quickly. I’m not sure why, it’s just something they do. It must be the little voice in a pilot’s head that’s always encouraging them to be on time, to stay on schedule, to not be late. So Steve and I started walking toward our new gate at a typical pilot’s quick pace. Steve was about three steps ahead of me when I asked him one question or another. What I asked doesn’t matter. Steve, being the remarkably polite person he is, craned his neck around as he walked so he could look back at me as he answered my question. It was the polite thing to do.

I saw the problem coming long before Steve did. In fact, Steve never saw it coming. Ahead of Steve, and completely unbeknownst to him, was an older gentleman who had come to a stop directly in Steve’s path. The man had his hands resting on the handle of his suitcase, his head tilted way back to read one of the departure screens hanging from the ceiling. All the poor man wanted to do was figure out what gate he needed to head toward. Steve was not going to allow that to happen. 

I saw it coming. I saw it coming with plenty of time to warn Steve. I could have even warned the innocent man scanning the departure screen dangling above his head. I desperately wanted to warn both of them and I really would have, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember Steve’s name. What had he said it was? Richard? Sam, maybe? All I could do was snap my finger a couple times like I was trying to get a dog’s attention. As I snapped I said something like, “Oh…hey..hey..um…Oh, no.”

Steve was mid-sentence and mid-stride when the two men met. Steve didn’t just run into the man, he plowed through him. The absolute center of his chest collided with the absolute center of the older gentleman’s body. It wasn’t a graze. It was a violent collision. Lawrence Taylor, the New York Giants hall of fame linebacker rarely hit a guy as hard as Steve did that afternoon. I watched the older gentleman’s head whiplash to the side. He stumbled several steps, made a kind of prehistoric grunt, and for a moment got into a defensive position, fists in the air. He was certain a fight was about to ensue, and who could blame him? The three of us stood there, our eyes darting back and forth at each other. 

Steve started apologizing immediately because, as I’ve said, he’s super polite. The older gentleman had a look on his face like a mixture of anger, confusion, and fear, as if convinced he was about to get mugged by two guys dressed up as pilots. None of us laughed because it wasn’t funny yet. A few hours later, however, while we were cruising from one city to another, I turned to Steve and said, “Man, that was one of the most amazing open-field tackles I’ve ever seen in an airport.” He looked at me for a moment, and then we laughed until we couldn’t breathe. 

One time, after an excruciatingly long day, we had to go-around (aborted landing) at one o’clock in the morning because the only other airplane in the air within 5,000 miles at the time was a little Cessna landing directly in front of us. That Cessna took up all 6,000 feet of runway after landing when it only needed about 500 feet. We were cursing at him on our entire final approach. “Get off the runway you idiot!” I could even hear the sleepy air traffic controller rolling his eyes when he told us to “go around.” 

Another time, while we were at a gate getting our airplane ready to go way up in the air, the airplane suddenly and violently rocked from one side to the other. That’s not supposed to happen when you are sitting on the ground. At a gate. Our heads both snapped to look at each other. “What the hell was that?” we both asked.

Because it was the two of us in the airplane, I figured one of the wings had probably just spontaneously fallen off the airplane. We jumped out of the cockpit, excused ourselves past wide-eyed passengers and ran down the jetway stairs. A wing hadn’t fallen off, but one of the baggage handlers had decided to drive his baggage cart into the side of our airplane rather than around it. Our airplanes were like a magnet for what airlines call “incidents”.

We even got yelled at by an air traffic controller once for what I would like to think was an innocent little mistake. The controller had a vastly different opinion. The worst thing a pilot can ever hear on the radio from a controller is this – “I have a phone number for you. Let me know when you’re ready to copy it down.” Steve and I got to hear it that day, of course, both of us closing our eyes and reaching for our pens. It was the only time in my career that I ever heard it, and I was with Steve.

The FAA never wants you to call them so they can congratulate you for getting people safely from one place to another. Never. A week later, we had a conference call with important people at the FAA with deep voices. Steve was in one state and I was in another. Both of us were breathing heavily into our phones, wondering if our flying days were over. Thankfully, the FAA only wagged its terrifying finger at us and let us live another day. 

And then there was that one time. We were somewhere in New York State, sitting in an airport for hours as we waited for our destination (and the birthplace of delays), Chicago O’Hare, to finally let us start heading in that direction. Passengers were angry. We were angry. By the time we finally took off, we knew it would be well past midnight when we landed. What could be worse, right?

Well, I’ll tell you what could be worse. About 45 minutes out of Chicago, I thought I heard Steve groan. I looked over at him and he looked over at me. “I don’t feel very good,” he said. “At all,” he added. He had the kind of look on his face that people have when they know bad things are about to happen to their body. I nodded my head and then immediately started replaying our delay in my mind. Did we eat at the same place? Did he look a little pale before we boarded? Is he contagious? 

“I’m going to need to head to the back,” Steve said a few minutes later. The back, where the one, tiny, coffin-like restroom is shared by 50 passengers. I don’t know what the rules are now, but back then, anytime a pilot left the cockpit to use the restroom, a flight attendant had to come sit in the cockpit. That way there were always two people in the cockpit, even if one of them had no idea how to fly an airplane. So that’s what we did and with every passing minute, Chicago was getting closer and closer. I had no idea what was going on in the airplane’s restroom, but I knew it wasn’t good.

I started to feel bad for the flight attendant. She sat there staring out at the beautiful, black night sky, not realizing that anyone on an airplane with Joe and Steve was at an elevated risk. There was no explanation for it. No one had an answer to why this was the case, certainly not Joe or Steve. It had just become a fact of life, an undeniable reality. I don’t think anything could have surprised the two of us. 

As I watched the miles tick away and heard the air traffic controller ask us to start our descent into Chicago, I wanted to take the flight attendant’s hand and hold it in both of mine. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” I’d say, gently squeezing her hand. “But there is a good chance that Steve is going to die back there. Possibly from food poisoning, maybe a heart attack. We just don’t know yet. As a matter of fact, I might even die before this flight is over. Are we going to crash? Probably. I don’t have time to explain because I’ve got to start teaching you how to help me land an airplane in Chicago.” 

I don’t know how long Steve was fighting demons in the bathroom, but it seemed like forever. The flight attendant was sweating quietly in the seat next to me. I was seconds away from letting air traffic control know that we had a rather serious problem on our hands when Steve buzzed us to let him back in. O’Hare airport was getting bigger and bigger ahead of us. We were almost there, and I had never been happier to see a guy that now looked like a week-old corpse. 

When we got on the hotel shuttle bus, it was standing room only. The delays had created countless cancellations. Everyone needed a hotel room, but none of them needed one like Steve did. The two of us ended up standing on the bus, face to face, each with one arm gripping the overhead bars made for just such an event. People were packed around us like sardines.

Once again, I wanted to warn people of the danger they were in. I wanted to shout it out, “Joe and Steve are on this bus! Save yourselves! Protect your children!” Steve’s face was a sickly mixture of white and yellow and there was sweat running down his forehead. He closed his eyes as the bus rattled and shook its way toward the hotel. I couldn’t help but imagine the dreadful possibilities, which made me wish I wasn’t standing so close to him. Certainly not face to face like this. 

It is a true miracle that Steve made it to his hotel room that night without causing a real scene. He buried himself in his room and didn’t come out until late the next afternoon. We had another day of flying ahead of us, and we both needed time to prepare ourselves.

Yet, despite it all, I loved flying with Steve. He’s the kind of guy you don’t mind spending countless hours with, even when everything goes to hell. I looked forward to any trip that had his name on the schedule. He was one of the good guys. Steve is a captain now and I’d like to think that he’s a really good one because he somehow survived flying with me. We both learned a lot about teamwork and facing ridiculous problems. What doesn’t kill you, they say, only makes you stronger. 

I’m a teacher now, and it’s really hard in a different way than flying is. When that one student has brought me to the brink of insanity, I must always remind myself that things could always be worse – I could be teaching with Steve.