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He is not the first pilot I’ve flown with to be killed when a flying machine hit the ground. I knew him better than the others, though, so it doesn’t surprise me that his death affects me more than the others did. What does surprise me is the intensity of my sense of loss, and in this I am not alone. We expect mortals to die. We even expect some to die unexpectedly. But The Skipper was, if not immortal, very near to indestructible. He didn’t like to be called by his name except, perhaps, by a very few. He created an alternative persona, The Skipper, and was generally successful in forcing those around him to deal with The Skipper rather than him by his given name. He created a character he liked, and over time he became that character. He was an extreme man. He escaped from his unpleasant childhood into the Marine Corps and became a commissioned officer before he was 21. His passion was perfection, whether it be his encyclopedic detailed knowledge of arms and airplanes, or something as mundane as perfect logbook entries, always in black ink, of every flight in each of the more than 145 types of aircraft he’d flown. He kept himself in superb condition. As he reached the threshold of middle age, he delighted in surpassing younger men in feats of strength and stamina. The Skipper was a bully at times. I don’t think he was intentionally cruel, but he was always on stage, and he played his flawed character to perfection. He was superstitious and bound by rituals. Shoes must be laced left over right, and when you left The Skipper’s cockpit, you left the ends of your seatbelts crossed left over right. He had petty procedures for nearly everything, though there was often some underlying value. There was no good reason for seat belts to be fastened The Skipper’s way, but if they were, they were not lying on the deck gathering dirt. Perhaps his best known rite in our airline was that of blessing the flight before each takeoff. Failure to bless the flight was an affront to the gods; delays, bad weather, and mechanical problems were sure to result. I always wondered at the wording, which seemed to me to include a poor choice of adverbs. I laughed hard a few years ago when watching a Biblical epic on late-night TV. So that’s where The Skipper got his blessing: “So let it be written, so let it be done.” His abusiveness in dealing with adults was balanced by time he spent teaching teenagers to fly sailplanes in summer camps. He was a superb flight instructor who would not let his students fail, and not just because it might reflect poorly on him. Some thought him a fascist, but I never heard him utter a political word. Some thought him dangerous, but one with his ability to laugh at himself is not someone who might turn weapons on schoolchildren. I didn’t pay attention when he spoke of Armageddon. Had I realized that several years ago he predicted the end of the world would come in July 1999, I’d have probably needled him about it in recent weeks. We laughed off one prediction of this frustrated warrior whose greatest disappointment in life was that he’d never had the opportunity to prove himself in combat. He believed his end would come in the form of a bullet from behind. The Skipper died in a collision between his latest flying passion—a small gyroplane—and an ultra-light airplane on a sunny weekend in July. It was only his world that ended at the time he predicted, not yours and mine. And although his death came unseen from behind, the bullet was of aluminum and fabric, not of copper and lead. When I heard the news, as disbelief turned to tears, my first thought and a thought of many who knew him was, The Skipper must have forgotten to bless the flight.
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