She’d been training in the simulator for years.”
I let that hang for a second.
“She was terrified,” I added. “I watched her say that into the radio. ‘I’m scared.’ But she also knew what to do with her hands and her voice.
She listened to her father and to the controller on the ground. She treated fear like a piece of data instead of a verdict.”
He swallowed.
“What happened?” he whispered, even though he probably knew from the fact that I was sitting there telling him the story.
“She got us down,” I said simply. “It wasn’t pretty.
We bounced. We almost ran out of runway. But one hundred forty‑seven people walked away.”
He stared at me.
“And that helped you?”
“It helped me remember that being scared doesn’t mean something bad is happening,” I said.
“It means something important is happening. The same system that tells you not to touch a hot stove is the one ringing the alarm when the plane jolts. The question is what you do after you feel it.”
He looked down at his hands.
“I grip the armrests and imagine flames,” he admitted.
“Maybe next time you feel it, you can ask yourself a different question,” I suggested.
“Instead of ‘what if we fall,’ maybe ‘what is this fear trying to tell me?’ That you love your kids? That you don’t want this to be the last thing you remember? Use that.
Call home more. Say the thing you keep saving for later.”
He let out a breath he’d been holding.
“That’s… weirdly helpful,” he said.
The plane jolted again, a quick drop and rise.
He flinched, then glanced at me.
“This would be the part where the eleven‑year‑old tells me to breathe, right?” he said.
“Exactly,” I answered.
Some days, that silence between bumps is the bravest place in the world.
Have you ever sat across from your own fear and realized it was just trying to point at what you love most?
I tell Flora’s story a lot now.
Sometimes it’s to nervous flyers at thirty thousand feet. Sometimes it’s to my daughter, when she calls from her dorm room on the East Coast and complains about a professor who makes her feel small.
“He gave me a C on the lab,” my daughter said once, pacing on FaceTime, her dorm ceiling spinning in the background.
“He said I’m not cut out for engineering. That I overthink everything.”
“Overthinking saved my airplane once,” I reminded her.
She stopped pacing.
“You’re going to tell the Flora story again, aren’t you?” she said.
“Maybe,” I said. “Because there was a girl who spent every weekend in a simulator, paying attention to every dial and checklist.
The day something impossible happened, she didn’t wish she’d done fewer practice runs. She leaned on every ‘overthought’ detail and saved us.”
My daughter rolled her eyes, but I saw a little smile.
“You’re saying the thing that makes me annoying might be the thing that saves somebody someday,” she said.
“I’m saying the world is full of people who will tell you your fear and your care are too much,” I answered. “I’m just grateful I was on a flight where someone’s ‘too much’ preparation meant I got to come home.”
We were quiet for a second.
“Do you regret it?” she asked finally.
“What?”
“Letting her do it,” my daughter said.
“If something had gone wrong, everyone would have blamed you for letting a kid fly.”
I thought of the investigator’s recorder, of the comment sections, of the tremor in Flora’s voice when she said “I’m scared” over an open frequency.
“No,” I said. “I regret that she had to be in that position at all. I regret the pasta, the missed catering checklist, the system that let both pilots get sick at the same time.
But I don’t regret believing her when she told me she could do it.”
“Even if it had gone bad?”
“Even then,” I said.
Sometimes the hardest boundary you ever draw is the one between what other people think is reasonable and what you know is right when the door to the cockpit is closed and it’s just you and the truth.
If you’re still with me after all this—that day in the sky, the clapping on the runway, the quiet Target aisles, the therapy sessions and turbulence and late‑night calls—you probably feel something tugging at you that isn’t just curiosity about aviation.
Maybe it’s the moment Flora pressed her thumb on the red autopilot button even though her voice shook.
Maybe it’s the image of her standing by the stairs on the runway with that blue plastic badge glinting against her sweatshirt.
Maybe it’s the scene of her sitting at a kitchen table surrounded by math books and takeout containers, saying she likes remembering what it felt like to be that scared and still do the thing.
Those are the images that stay with me.
And if you’re reading this on a little screen, maybe on a bus or in line somewhere or scrolling in bed when you can’t sleep, I’m curious about something.
Which moment landed hardest for you—the call over the intercom asking, “Can anyone fly this plane,” the second an eleven‑year‑old stepped into the cockpit and said “I can,” the instant you heard her say “I’m scared” into the radio and keep going anyway, or the quiet later, when the applause was over and the question became what any of us are supposed to do with our own fear?
When was the first time you drew a line for yourself or for someone you loved and said, “I’m terrified, but this is the choice I’m making”?
If you ever feel like telling someone about it, I’d be honored if it was me.
Because I’ve seen what can happen when one small person in the middle of a metal tube full of strangers takes fear by the hand, sits down in the captain’s seat, and refuses to let it fly the plane.
And I don’t think that kind of courage belongs at thirty‑five thousand feet.
I think it belongs in living rooms and group chats and comment sections and all the quiet places where we decide what kind of people we’re going to be.
Fear is information.
The rest is up to us.
