Captain Roy Haskell stood in the narrow aisle with the cockpit door open behind him and one hand gripping the seat back of 2D, and he looked at the silver wings on my cardigan the way a man looks at a face he has not seen in forty years. I am Edith Calloway, seventy nine years old, and I sat in seat 3C with my crossword book closed on my lap and a pencil in my fist. The girl across the aisle was still recording. The first officer, Danny Morrow, had gone the color of the paper cup on my tray table. “Edie,” the captain said hoarsely. “Edith Calloway. Is that you?”
In 1981, I became the first woman to command a jet airliner for Frontier Airlines, a distinction I did not seek and was not entirely comfortable with. I flew for thirty one years. In 1984, between my trips, I taught evenings at a little flying school in Wichita, and one of my students was a lanky twenty three year old named Roy Haskell, who could not hold a crosswind landing to save his life. We practiced in a Cessna 172 over a field of winter wheat, until the day he put her down on the centerline like a feather. I cried, and so did he, and we ate a sandwich on the wing of the Cessna afterward in the cold sunshine, laughing like two children who had gotten away with something.
The wings on my collar were the first airline captain wings ever issued to a woman, in a ceremony that the company photographer barely attended. The captain, now gray and heavy shouldered, turned to the passengers of the first class cabin. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said in the voice of a man making an announcement, “this lady taught me to land an airplane. I would not be sitting in that seat without her.” The cabin was still. The businessman in 3D put down his drink so carefully that the ice did not rattle.
A pair of silver wings on a cardigan gave one retired captain the length of a flight to teach a young officer the truth over Denver.
I gave my terms when the captain asked what he could do. “Roy, I would like nothing more than to sit in the jump seat for the landing in Atlanta. And I would like your first officer to sit beside me for the first half hour of the flight and listen to an old woman talk about the sky. He is not a bad young man. He is a young man who has not yet been told no. I would like to tell him a few things the airlines forgot to put in the manual.”
Danny came forward with his cap in his hands and tears standing in his eyes. “Madam, I am so sorry,” he said. “I have flown seven hundred hours, and I thought that made me something.” His voice shook. “My mother is a nurse. She would be so ashamed of me.” I looked at him for a long moment, and then I patted the empty seat across the aisle. “Sit,” I said. “The most dangerous moment in an airplane is the moment a pilot believes he has nothing left to learn.”
But in the middle of it, the stubborn part of Danny stirred one last time. He reached out suddenly, snatched at the silver wings on my collar, and tore them loose from the cardigan, and wheeled toward the cockpit with them in his fist, babbling that he had to verify them with the company. He took two steps down the aisle. Gina, the flight attendant, stepped out of the galley with a coffee cart and rolled it squarely across the aisle. The businessman from 3D rose, quite deliberately, and stood beside the cart with his arms folded.
Danny stopped with the wings pressed to his palm. The girl who had been recording lowered her phone, and every passenger in the first class cabin looked at the young officer with quiet, level eyes. The captain did not raise his voice. “First Officer Morrow,” he said, “give Mrs. Calloway her wings.” The young man turned. His shoulders dropped. He walked back down the aisle, past the coffee cart and the businessman, and dropped to one knee beside my seat, and with unsteady hands, pinned them onto my collar himself.
The consequences were handled in the most civilized manner imaginable. The captain filed a short, honest report. Danny sat beside me for forty minutes over the plains of Kansas, and listened. I told him about the day I landed in a blizzard in Duluth, and the day an engine quit over Idaho, and the day the senior captain refused to shake my hand. He asked questions, good ones. When we began our descent into Atlanta, I sat in the jump seat of the cockpit, with my crossword book on my knee, and watched my old student put the airplane on the runway like a feather.
In the name of my husband Walter, who passed in 2018, I started the Walter Calloway Fund. It pays for flight lessons and scholarships for girls who dream of becoming pilots, in Sedgwick, Butler and Harvey counties. In the first year we sent twenty three girls up in a Cessna for the first time and funded four private pilot licenses. One was a cattle rancher daughter from Augusta who soloed on her seventeenth birthday, and who brought me a bouquet of wheat.
At the gate in Atlanta, my sister was waiting with a ninetieth birthday cake and a crowd of grandchildren. Danny carried my bag down the jet bridge. At the bottom, he stopped, set it down, and pulled a small card out of his pocket. It was his own pilot license, laminated and creased. “Mrs. Calloway,” he said, “would you sign the back?” I took my pencil, the one I use for crosswords, and wrote on the back of it, in capitals, LAND SOFT, and under it, my name. He tucked it into his breast pocket, over his heart.