Aviation Therapy Started Long Before I Thought of Giving It a Name
I have been a pilot since I was 16 years old and took my first flight at Weiser Air Park, northwest of Houston, in June 1978. In 1984, I began a 20-year flying career for the United States Air Force. Since retiring in July 2004, I have been an airline pilot for Southwest Airlines.
Many people ask what we do in the cabin during the flight. They assume that we are as busy flying the plane as you would be driving your car on the highway. The truth is that we typically only fly manually for the first and last three minutes of a flight, usually below 2,000 to 5,000 feet. The rest of the time we spent programming and managing the autopilot to make most of the flight smoothly, so we spent a lot of time talking.
We share stories about our family, our past, our flights in the military or our experience in civil aviation. I’m lucky to have done a little bit of everything in aviation, from getting my private license in little Piper Cherokees, flying a hang glider over central Texas, driving a B-52 bomber, and then flying the Air Force’s heavy KC-10 refueling tankers and the sleek Gulfstream G-III and GV.
A week after my military retirement, I began flying Boeing 737s for Southwest. My varied experience has allowed me to share stories with a diverse group of fellow aviators, from deployments with military pilots, cargo flights with cargo pilots, to VIP transportation on executive aircraft with corporate pilots.
The spark to tell my story
I flew during numerous world historical events, from the Cold War to the invasion of Panama, Operation Desert Storm over Iraq, the Bosnian War in the mid-1990s, and the events during and after September 11, 2001. This book is an aviation memoir of my intersections with history. These are my most frequent flight stories between 1978 and 2004.
The project started in October 2021, when I was on vacation with my wife, my brother and his wife. We were having drinks at the bar and I told him the story of my trip with the US Army Rangers to Mogadishu, Somalia, in the 1990s. Those soldiers would be involved in the incident Fallen Black Hawk.
On the day we left the troops, the airfield came under mortar fire from Somali rebels, and UN soldiers from Romania responded with mortar fire into the surrounding hills. I was the commander of a 500,000-pound KC-10, a military version of the DC-10, and it’s not going anywhere fast.
With a storm approaching to our left and black smoke to our right, we set off in a hurry. When I finished telling this oft-told “war story,” my brother said, “I didn’t know you were there.” That’s when it occurred to me that I needed to write my stories, and Mogadishu was the first story I wrote.
Discovering Aviation therapy
My self-published memoirs, Ready for Takeoff: Stories from an Air Force PilotIt was a great project and I really enjoyed reliving the memories from the pages of my logbook and reconnecting with lifelong friends. Mainly I felt like I was writing “our stories” and not my stories.
After completing the first draft, I sent several chapters to friends involved in those chapters. I told them I didn’t want the book to come out and have our friends say, “That’s stupid. It didn’t happen that way.”
I heard from many Air Force friends I met between 1984 and 2004. Some told me details I didn’t know or had forgotten, but I gave them credit for their memories. One of my co-pilots was excited to find out that his name would be in a book. Another said that his mother always told him that he should write his stories, so she gave him my book and said, “Here you go!”
The writing exercise has also been enlightening as the process has unfolded. In my autobiographical Chapter 1, I talk about my little sister raising not one, but two horses when she was a shy teenager. I thought I enjoyed equine therapy at its finest. Then it hit me: I gained self-confidence and came out of my shell thanks to aviation. I benefited from Aviation therapy.
From self-publishing to the big stage
Once my self-published book, Ready for takeoffwas complete in November 2022, I submitted it to numerous periodicals, both aviation and professional magazines, for review. My biggest disappointment came when Air & Space Quarterly (from the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum) said that their policies prevented them from reviewing or promoting self-published material that had not been vetted by an editor. At that moment I was determined to publish my story.
By a stroke of luck, on a river cruise in Europe in April 2023, I met an author, Yi Shun Lai, a novelist from California. Later we read each other’s books and Yi Shun said that, from my first book, he could tell that there was an underlying current of perseverance and personal growth throughout my history. She then encouraged me to rewrite my manuscript and join her in November 2023 at a writers’ conference in Kansas City.
There I met Christine Wolf, a Chicago editor who specializes in memoirs and nonfiction, but who knew nothing about aviation or the military. He loved the manuscript and my stories. After his first read, he told me that he was sad when he got to the last chapter because he didn’t want it to end.
Aviation Therapy: A Story of Perseverance
After answering their probing questions about what pilots think and what our families endured, the newly strengthened book was sold to several publishers, both in Texas and the Northeast. My book was picked up in August 2024 by Stoney Creek Publishing, a division of Texas A&M Press. (No small feat for this Texas Longhorn!)
The publisher told me that there are two book release cycles: spring and fall, and that their plate for spring 2025 releases was full. After 15 months, Aviation Therapy: Stories of Perseverance and Personal Growth It is now ready for purchase in paperback, e-book, and audio, which I recorded at Austin Audio Lab.
Air and Space Quarterly enjoyed the newly published synopsis of the book and wrote to me in September 2025 to tell me that they would not only review it but also include it in the upcoming winter issue (January 2026), which would include an in-depth interview with me. Even the writing of this second report has been a story of perseverance.
My aviation stories will appeal to a wide range of readers, from anyone interested in an aviation career to military history enthusiasts.
Discover Aviation Therapy: Stories of Perseverance and Personal Growth from the Cockpit, now available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook at Amazon.
