As an airline pilot, I generally try to stay out of the newspapers. Finding oneself on the front page of The New York Times usually means you’ve bent some metal, partied too hard on an overnight or finally lost patience with the TSA and sucker punched one of its goons while cellphone cameras rolled. And yet lately, I have found myself the subject of numerous articles in the various papers of record, and the news has actually been quite good. According to these stories, I am in possession of certain skills that are shortly to be in high demand, and I can expect to be rewarded accordingly. Excellent!
You would think that my fellow crew members would share my enthusiasm for this serendipitous turn of events, but their reactions tend to be surprisingly cool: shrugs, eye rolls, even scoffs. It seems I am flying with a rather jaded lot, who, after years of industry turbulence, is not quite ready to accept that good times are just around the corner. Perhaps they don’t want to jinx it. Perhaps they are natural pessimists. Perhaps they’ve heard it all before. When I waved a Wall Street Journal article on the forthcoming pilot shortage at a doubting co-worker, he dismissed it thusly: “Yeah, I’ll bet they quote Kit Darby.”
