The world may cover almost 200 million square miles and support upwards of six billion people, over 700,000 of whom are active pilots, but it is still, in my experience, a very small place. I once literally bumped into Patty Wagstaff in a doorway of Grand Central Station, even though neither of us lives in New York. I ran into another pilot I knew from California-and whom I hadn't seen in at least five years-in a small café on a little side street in Paris. And I gave up trying to date more than one man at a time after two men I was seeing concurrently…who lived in cities 2,500 milesapart …both ended up at the same intimate cocktail party I was attending up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. I mean, really. What are the chances of any of that?
Quite large, actually, in the small-town global village that is aviation.
So perhaps it's not such a wild coincidence that when I mentioned I was going to French Polynesia to my one and only French friend in San Francisco, it would turn out that two of her best friends-both of whom are pilots-live there. Or that the dive shop that happened to be affiliated with the hotel where I was staying would be co-owned by a pilot-whose father, also a pilot, owns one of the very few private general aviation airplanes in the country.
The rest of the world may be connected through six degrees of separation. But I've become firmly convinced that the flying world is connected by no more than two. And because aviation is not only a small world, but a small family, as well, all of those pilots immediately invited me to go flying. Which is how I can now proudly claim to have flown more than 10 percent of all the private, general aviation aircraft in the 118 islands of French Polynesia. Or, to do the math another way, a grand total of two.
Jacques Bernier, my friend Jacqueline's friend in Tahiti, is a pilot and air traffic controller from Toulouse, France. His wife is a physician and pilot who wanted to get away from her hectic life in France for a while, so Jacques arranged to be posted to Tahiti for a few years. A full century after the artist Paul Gauguin abandoned France for the South Seas, the idea of escaping to a more idyllic life in the Polynesian islands apparently still holds a strong allure.
