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 miles_apart …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.
