Fort Rucker—now Fort Novosel—smelled like hot sand, fresh–cut grass, and fear. Not the kind of fear that makes you freeze, but the kind that sharpens edges.
Flying school was a leveller. It didn’t matter where you came from, what your father thought of you, or how many high school trophies you had. The aircraft didn’t care. You either learned to keep the helicopter in the sky or you didn’t.
My first time at the controls of a TH–67, my instructor, CW3 Briggs, sat so relaxed it made me suspicious. One hand lightly on his own controls, one ankle crossed over the other, as if we were sitting on a porch swing instead of a vibrating classroom in the sky.
“Alright, Holt,” he said. “Your aircraft.”
My hands closed around the cyclic and collective. My feet settled on the pedals.
“My aircraft,” I said, the words feeling too big in my mouth.
The helicopter immediately began doing its best impression of a drunk bee. Nose wobbling, altitude drifting up, slide left, yaw right.
“Relax,” Briggs said, not touching anything. “You’re not wrestling it. You’re…dancing with it.”
“Sir, this is the worst date I’ve ever been on,” I muttered.
He laughed once, sharp.
“Good. Means you’re awake.”
By the fourth session, I could hover for maybe ten seconds at a time before the aircraft wandered. By the tenth, those ten seconds stretched into thirty. One evening, after the rest of the class had cleared the flightline, Briggs let me sit in the cockpit alone, rotors still, just touching each control with my eyes closed, rehearsing the tiny corrections my body was starting to memorize.
Later, in the barracks, guys would brag about how fast they’d soloed. I kept my head down and my grade sheets up.
Dad called once during that period.
“How’s flight school?”
“Humbling,” I said. “And good.”
“You get to shoot anything?”
“Mostly I get to not crash,” I said. “That’s the point of this part.”
“Well, at least when you’re done, you’ll never get lost,” he said.
He meant on the ground, in life. I thought about the stack of charts on my bunk, the way instructors drilled us on not just where we were but how we’d get home if every instrument went dark.
“I’m working on that,” I said.
When I finally got my wings, he didn’t come to the ceremony. He said he couldn’t get the time off work. I told myself it didn’t matter. I stood in formation, watched as a colonel pinned a tiny, heavy piece of metal above my heart, and felt something click into place that had nothing to do with approval.
Still, when I saw other families hugging their new pilots on the grass afterward, I had to walk a wide circle around the field before I trusted my face again.
Mom sent flowers. Dad sent a text.
Congrats. Don’t crash.
The stories I never told him
There are flights that stick to you.
The flood rescue was one. There were others.
There was the night a factory accident turned into a mass casualty event when a storm knocked out half the town’s power grid. We flew in under a ceiling so low it felt like the clouds were pressing a hand on our rotor disk. There were no cameras that night. Just a parking lot lit by headlights and headlamps, and a small knot of firefighters in turnout gear lifting people into our cabin on backboards. The smell of blood and hydraulic fluid mixed in the air.
There was the wildfire deployment where we flew Guard crews into the blackened skeleton of a forest, the air so full of ash it looked like it was snowing sideways. We spiraled down through columns of heat, checked and rechecked our escape routes, and never once let the Hawk forget we were paying attention.
Those stories lived in the quiet spaces. In the way I lined my boots up at night. In the extra second I took running my fingers over the aircraft skin on preflight, like a hand on a friend’s shoulder before a hard conversation.
To my father, I was “his girl in the Guard, riding the bus.”
After a while, I let him keep that. It was easier than handing him truth and watching him shrink it.
Until that note—Hope you finally got where you were going—and that landing, forced us both to admit we’d been wrong about the map.
Orientation flight
Getting an orientation flight approved for my father turned out to be easier than rewiring the way I thought about him being on my aircraft.
The CO raised an eyebrow when I asked.
“You sure that’s a good idea, Holt? Family dynamics and aviation don’t always mix.”
“I’m sure, sir,” I said. “He’s…earned a ride.”
That was one way to put it.
We put him through the same safety brief we gave community leaders and visiting VIPs. No loose hats, no phones out near the rotors, hands on your harness, listen to the crew chief. He nodded at all the right places, jaw set, eyes taking in everything.
“This seat recline?” he joked, dropping into the webbing.
The crew chief snorted.
“Only if we roll you out the back, sir.”
I climbed into the right seat, flicked through the startup checklist, feeling his eyes on the back of my helmet. It was like having a ghost in the cabin—not of someone dead, but of years of conversations we’d never had.
“Ready?” Daniels asked, hand hovering over the engine start.
“Ready,” I said. My voice sounded normal. My heart was running a lap around my ribs.
Rotors spun up. The vibrations climbed from buzz to steady hum. Gauges in the green. Crew chief gave the signal.
“Clear right,” I called.
“Clear left,” Daniels answered.
We lifted. The skids left the pad, the world falling away by inches, then feet. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dad’s hand tighten on the harness straps, knuckles whitening, then relax as we steadied into a hover.
“You doing all this?” he yelled over the intercom, craning forward to see my hands on the controls.
“Most of it,” I said. “Daniels is making sure I don’t get lazy.”
We climbed to a thousand feet, then traced the river’s curve, the city spread out like a map someone had finally let him see from above.
I talked him through what I was doing—small corrections, pedal inputs, power management—keeping it as simple as possible without patronizing either of us.
“It’s like balancing on a basketball while someone kicks it,” I said.
He laughed, a short burst of sound with more admiration in it than I’d ever heard when he talked about my work.
At one point, we flew over a highway where cars crawled along in both directions.
“Look down there,” I said. “That’s the mindset you’ve been stuck in. Two lanes. One direction or the other. Up here, it’s all vectors, headings, options.”
“You talking about roads or life?” he asked.
“Both,” I said.
We circled the edge of town, traced the rail yard, swung wide over the reservoir. On the way back in, I let him listen in on a practice radio exchange with the tower so he’d hear the cadence, the clipped readbacks, the way a dozen moving parts became one conversation.
When we touched down again, the crew chief opened the door, and Dad climbed out more carefully than he’d climbed in. The swagger was gone. So was the smirk.
He just stood there for a second, helmet still on, hair flattened, looking up at the rotor blades winding down.
“That,” he said finally, pulling the helmet off, “is not a bus.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not.”
The wedding we didn’t talk about
We never talked about Emily’s wedding after that.
Oh, he mentioned in passing that “your cousin got hitched, it was nice,” but he skipped the part where his wine glass hit the grass, where the neighbors filmed his slack jaw, where his daughter stepped into the belly of a machine he’d spent half his life romanticizing and closed the door.
That day became family lore in a sideways way. At Christmas, my mother would say, “Remember when your ride almost took the fence?” and the cousins would ask a thousand questions.
“Did you know it was coming?”
“What’s it like inside?”
“Can you do loops?”
Dad would stay mostly quiet during those conversations. Once, when my aunt said, “Her poor father nearly had a heart attack,” he corrected her mildly.
“He did fine,” he said. “He just had to update his software.”
I caught his eye across the table. He looked away first.
It’s strange when an entire relationship pivots on a single afternoon. It doesn’t make everything before it disappear. It doesn’t guarantee everything after will be smooth. It just changes the gravitational pull.
He still made comments sometimes. Old habits don’t just die; they fade like old paint. But there was less edge to them.
At a Fourth of July barbecue, when my cousin’s boyfriend started talking big about joining the Marines for “adventure,” Dad cut him off.
“You don’t sign up for adventure,” he said. “You sign up for work. The adventure part is mostly being cold, tired, and wet while you do it.”
The boyfriend shrugged.
“Still, it’d be cool to fly in one of those choppers,” he said.
Dad nodded toward me.
“Talk to her about that,” he said. “She knows what it costs.”
The blowback and the brag
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