Here I am, spending the night in the pilots’ trailer next door to the Bay Area Skydiving hanger out at Byron Airport, a 70-mile drive from Palo Alto. The first time I came out here with one of my students on a training flight, and looked into that big hangar, buzzing with activity as young people in tattoos, cut-off shorts, tank tops, and neon jump suits packed parachutes and waited for their turn to jump, I felt like I was looking into a pirate den or a smuggler’s cove. As though they were a gang or a tribe unto themselves.
I delivered a pilot resume to the crew-cut rough-spoken owner. Over the weeks I kept in close contact, updating my total flight hours on my resume each week and mailing him a copy. Then, my phone rang early one morning. On the other end I heard aircraft in the background and a voice yelling to be heard over the noise, “There ought to be a picture of you in the dictionary under ‘persistence’–I got your resumes.”
An incredibly lucky break. Never before had they hired a pilot who wasn’t already also a frequent skydiver at Bay Area Skydiving. And, they hadn’t had an opening for over a year, but one of their two jump pilots had just been hired by a regional airline.
With the chief pilot’s tutelage, I learned how to take off at 100 miles per hour with a load of 5 skydivers in the padded rear of the Cessna 206, climb to 10,000 feet, advise Stockton Approach, yaw the nose to open a hatch door, slow the plane down to just above a stall, drop the jumpmaster and cameraman and student. Then, to yaw the nose left and point the nose and right wing down to swing the hatch door shut, before launching into a 200 MPH dive back down to the airport to land on the narrow runway.
Tonight, as operations ceased, I looked out at the sun setting over the ridge that separates us from San Francisco Bay. Grassy hills turned brown, dotted with power generating windmills. Weather beaten hangars and the sound of wind across the runway. The sky went from black to blue to yellow to orange to red, and Mercury and Mars could be seen in the clear dry air. Growing up I always thought, ‘I belong up there.’ And now I feel I’ve kept that promise to myself.
