Modern Love: How I Earned My Wings Back

I GOT married a few months ago, but my husband a proud Air Force pilot from a small town in Georgia doesn’t know how we met. Rather, he doesn’t know the path that led me to him. By the time he was perched on one knee and presenting an engagement ring, I feared it was too late to tell the love of my life that we had been brought together not by fate but as a result of my nationwide crusade to find a pilot.

The idea came after my date with an especially careerist suitor on Match.com who tried to exploit our dinner for professional gain. He took me to McCormick & Schmick’s, plied me with wine and pumped me for information about my job as a magazine editor. I was flattered that he was so intrigued by my life until he lifted his glass of merlot to his lips and said, “Hey, I just thought of this, but I’ve got this story that would be perfect for your magazine.”

Only days later my friend Stephanie was similarly ambushed when a candidate for the State Assembly took her to a Thai restaurant and later refused to leave her doorstep unless she agreed to buy a plate at his fund-raising dinner.

I knew that the men of Southern California might be eager to take advantage of Internet matchmaking for sex, but for career climbing at the same time? Here we were opening our hearts after debilitating breakups, hoping for true love, and these bozos were gaming the system for business opportunities. I thought it was despicable. Until the day I decided it was brilliant.

I had just spent Thanksgiving at my recently engaged younger sister’s house and was moping my way through the security line at Dulles Airport. As I tossed my shoes, liquids and laptop into separate bins, a JetBlue pilot cut in front of me. I checked his left hand for a ring (present), but the fact that I’d even looked surprised me. In the nearly five years I’d spent as a flight attendant for United, I’d never met a pilot who warranted the ring check. Rounds of furloughs had pretty much weeded out the young and eligible.

Since the day I was furloughed myself, I had longed for the jet-set life of waking up in Paris on Monday and Hong Kong on Friday. Unfortunately, the sleep-deprived crews I saw jogging to McDonald’s between flights with runs in their hose suggested that working conditions were still sliding downhill.

But what if I were to fall in love with a pilot? No longer would I have to peddle onboard snacks or work 14-hour shifts to earn my trips around the world. And it’s not as if I’d have to become some Debra Winger-style groupie from “An Officer and a Gentleman,” desperate for a pilot to rescue me from my backwater town; I was already living happily in Los Angeles and gainfully employed. I would merely start using “pilot” as a search term to help narrow the field, just as my previous date seemingly had used “magazine editor.”

Back home, under the fluorescent lights of my office, I was pleased to find 35 results within 25 miles. The first, LonelyBrian, I disqualified by user name alone. Then came the other mismatches a guy working on a TV pilot, a computer programmer looking for a “co-pilot” in life.

I expanded my search to the surrounding states and found a first officer for a regional airline based in Phoenix. But in his response, he mentioned quitting the disintegrating world of commercial air travel to fly border patrols, which would pay him more than the whopping $19,000 a year he’d been earning.

When I took my search nationwide I found mostly military pilots, a deal-breaker for me, having grown up near the troublemaking Marines and lonely military wives of Camp Pendleton. Then I saw NavyShark. He was so good-looking that I obviously at an especially shallow point in my already shallow search had to at least click on his profile. A few hours later, having identified me from the “Who’s viewed me” function, he wrote from Norfolk, Va.

He mentioned that he planned to leave the service in a year to move on to commercial jets. I figured a year wasn’t too long, and he was divorced (read: willing to marry in the first place), which in Southern California is seen as great potential for commitment.

After a month of e-mail messages and calls, he was sent to San Diego, and soon I was holding onto the arm of his leather bomber jacket as we toured the hangars of the historic air base on Coronado Island. I was awed by his stories of spending three weeks in survival training, being tortured in mock-P.O.W. camps and foraging for food in the woods in the dead of winter. I had landed a hero. He was everything the lawyers and real estate developers of Orange County weren’t.

Tiffany Hawk has just finished a novel about flight attendants.

source : feeds.nytimes.com

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Submited at Friday, January 8th, 2010 at 11:00 pm on Fashion by Brinkster
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