This is Your Captain Speaking

Jessee just got back from Provo, where she was dealing with student medical issues. On the way back she got to fly as the copilot! The plane was full, so they just let her ride in the cockpit. I doubt there are many places in the world where they'll let you do that.

I encouraged her to write about the experience herself, but she's really busy writing incident reports for the medical issues, so I'll do my best to recount what she told me. It's just too good of a story to go undocumented.

Their trip over to Provo was pretty last-minute (they just left yesterday evening), so they had to fit in whichever open seats there were. Going there, that meant flying standby. Coming back, it meant riding on somebody else's charter and sitting in the co-pilot's seat!

Jessee said just sitting up there made her nervous. There are hundreds of switches, dials, levers, and gauges. One switch, she said, was even hanging out of the console by its wires. Luckily it was only for the de-icing mechanism - not critically important down here. She even had her own steering wheel. When the pilot came, he leaned over and said, "Okay, ya know what you're doing?"

"NO!," she shot back at him. He was obviously amused by her uneasiness with the situation. She said she was worried she'd actually have to control the plane in someway. When there are two pilots, both of them push on the throttle and each plays a role making the plane fly. Or if something happened to the pilot, she'd be the only one there to deal with it. I think it sounds like a lot of fun. I hope I get the same opportunity when I fly on Friday.