Who sits in your judgment seat?

It was time for our weekly lunch meeting of the local aviation mafia and we were all sitting in the sandwich shop around the corner from the airport. Our group consisted of yours truly and three guys I had known for years from our shared flying experiences.

After the food was ordered, delivered, and eaten, we sat down at our usual table in the back. Our conversation went from “How are your kids and grandkids doing?” to what could only be described as alcohol-induced freshman dorm bullshit.

Jim, our local AI (IA?) and mechanical genius, brought up a topic I hadn’t thought about in a long time.

“Okay,” Jim said. “Name at least four people from history or the present that you would like to take with you. Who would you want to sit in your right seat for a long flight and talk to?”

Harry joined the conversation and asked, “Do these people have to be real, or can they be fictional?”

He had a good point. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve pretended to explain aviation to a ninth-century Mongol or a spaceship captain who needed a ride. I’d be embarrassed to admit how much flying time Captains Kirk and Piccard had with me.

“Seriously?” Captain Kirk said to me. “You get your food from a filthy galley and not a food replicator?

“You call this Earl Grey tea?” Piccard would sputter. “Hey, watch out for that thunderstorm – make it so!”

The group at the table decided to exclude all fictional characters, from Winnie the Pooh, who wanted to fly with bees, to Peter Pan, who had a habit of snorting some kind of substance and getting high.

We got to talking and mentioned people like Yeager, Armstrong, and Earhart. Some of the people on my friends list surprised me, some bored me, and some were intriguing.

I had drunk too much iced tea, which meant I couldn’t finish Frank’s list. When I came back from finishing the tea, it turned out it was my turn.

“Believe it or not,” I said, “I’ve thought about this quite a bit. My list of dream court sitters might surprise you enough to buy me lunch.”

My first choice would of course be Benjamin Franklin.

I’ve sat by Ben’s grave quite a few times during layovers in Philadelphia and always wanted to talk to him at a bar, ask questions and drink some milk punch (a heady mix of brandy, lemon juice, nutmeg, sugar, water and warm whole milk). There would be plenty to talk about as we flew through air bases and climbed through thunderstorms.

For example, I bet he would notice that I was wearing bifocals, his invention. He might be interested in watching lightning from storms as we wandered around them. He might be surprised to discover that lightning bolts shoot from the tops of storms.

My lunch partners looked at their watches and started to shiver a little, so I immediately came up with option number two: Winston Churchill.

Winston was always someone I enjoyed being around. He founded the Royal Naval Air Service, which led to the formation of the RAF, and he did a fair bit of flying, but never alone.

He was involved in more plane crashes and accidents than Harrison Ford and flew more than forty hours in a dual flight, but he never flew solo.

The reason is funny when you think about it. Churchill’s wife Clementine forbade it. Apparently she thought it was safe enough to leave government to serve as a lieutenant colonel in the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers fighting in the trenches of World War I in 1915, but three touch-and-gos were too dangerous.

I would like to train him for his first solo flight in a local Cessna 150. He has no medical, but he doesn’t need one because he is dead.

My third choice is Jimmy Doolittle. Harry had already chosen Jim, but Harry wanted to fly the old Jimmy. I want to fly the Jimmy from the 1930s – air show and daredevil Jimmy.

We could talk about many things, and if we had time, I would ask him to teach me aerobatics. I know he lived long in our age of flying, but I bet he would love to shoot a CATIII approach to an Autoland. After all, he and others in the Guggenheim group invented instrument flying.

I saw my friends getting up from their seats, ready to go home, when I dropped them my fourth choice: my mother.

My mother never flew with me, and it wasn’t because I didn’t ask her to. She was the nervous type, and the closest we ever got to flying was taxiing in a 172 in 1973.

She’s been dead since 1990 and although she was proud that I became a pilot, she never saw me do it. I guess I was too cool a kid to trust. After all, she really knew me.

Our group now stood in the parking lot, squinting at the sun, and went our separate ways for a week. None of us knew if we would ever make it onto anyone’s right-hand-seat wish list.