AOPA Pilot Magazine - September 2019 - 71

BARRY AND BRIAN aboard the

Lockheed L-1011 (far left) in
which they worked together
for the first time on a TWA
flight (New York to Berlin,
1991). Barry taught Brian's
mother, Sandy, to fly in 1967,
shown here with Barry (left)
before her first solo and
while nine months pregnant
with Brian. (Was that really
a solo flight?) On page 68
is Brian at age 2 advancing the thrust levers of the
very same Boeing 727 that
he would fly for TWA as a
captain 30 years later.

He's flying that airplane!" That did it. I knew
instantly what I wanted to do-what I had to
do-with my life. I've always been thankful
for having discovered while so young that I
wanted to be a pilot. My focus and determination never wavered. The mere thought of
being in command of an airliner and flying
it to the other side of the world was compelling and consuming.
The first time Brian and I worked as
crewmembers on the same airline flight
was August 27, 1991. We operated a TWA
Lockheed L-1011 from New York to Berlin,
Germany, with Brian as the flight engineer
and me as the captain. During that flight, I
occasionally found myself looking back at
Brian, usually when he was hunched over
his small table and preoccupied with making fuel calculations or entering data in the
aircraft log.
He turned around once and caught
me looking his way. I pretended to be

checking something on his panel, but he knew better. And I knew that he knew. We
smiled at each other. Without uttering a word, I was saying, "Son, I am proud of who you
are, what you have accomplished, and where you are going." And his smile said, "Thanks
for helping me get here." These were thumbs-up smiles filled with love and respect. It
doesn't get much better than that.
Except perhaps on this flight to Hawaii.
I was 14 when I mustered the courage to ask Dad if I could learn to fly. That's the age at
which he began (but without parental consent). He said that he had been wondering if and
when I was going to ask. He added that as much as he had been hoping that I would want to
fly, he never wanted to suggest it for fear that I would be doing it to please him. He wanted
to be certain that I wanted to fly for the right reasons, because I wanted to, not because he
wanted me to. To further test my determination and make sure that I had some skin in the
game, he made me pay for part of the airplane rental out of the earnings from my afterschool job at a print shop. When he saw how serious I was about becoming a pilot, he bought
a Citabria, but I had to pay for my own fuel.
Dad was a demanding taskmaster and would admonish me with something like, "If you
can maintain 3,100 feet this well, then I'll bet you can maintain 3,000 feet just as well." I
can still hear to this day-even from the left seat of this Airbus-echoes of him prodding me
for perfection.
I was ready to solo long before my sixteenth birthday, and having to wait tested my
patience. One of Dad's endorsements in my logbook reads, "Ready for solo. Too bad." On the
big day, our priority was for me to solo before he took me to get a driver's license.
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AOPA Pilot Magazine - September 2019

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