Aviation Therapy Began Long Before I Ever Thought to Give it a Name
I have been a pilot since I was 16 years old, taking my first flight at Weiser Air Park in northwest 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 with Southwest Airlines.
A lot of people ask what we do up in the cockpit during flight. They assume we are as busy flying the plane as you would be driving your car down the highway. The truth is, we usually only hand-fly the first and last three minutes of a flight, typically below 2,000 to 5,000 feet. The rest of the time is spent programming and managing the autopilot to do most of the smooth flying, so we spend a lot of time talking.
We share stories of our family, our past, our flying in the military, or our backgrounds in civilian aviation. I am fortunate to have done a little bit of everything in aviation, from getting my private license in small Piper Cherokees, flying a hang glider over Central Texas, navigating a B-52 bomber, and then flying the Air Force’s heavy KC-10 air refueling tankers, and the elegant Gulfstream G-IIIs and G-Vs.
One week after my military retirement, I began flying Boeing 737s for Southwest. My varied background has allowed me to share stories with a diverse group of fellow aviators, from deployments with military pilots, cargo flights with freight pilots, to carrying VIPs on executive jets with corporate pilots.
The Spark to Tell My Story
I flew during numerous historic world 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 often-told flying stories from 1978 to 2004.
The project began in October 2021, when I was on vacation with my wife, my brother, and his wife. We were having drinks in the bar, and I told my story of flying the US Army Rangers into Mogadishu, Somalia, in the 1990s. Those soldiers would become involved in the incident of Black Hawk Down.
The day we dropped off the troops, the airfield came under mortar attack by the Somali rebels, and the UN soldiers from Romania returned 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 doesn’t go anywhere fast.
With a thunderstorm closing in from our left and black smoke on our right, we took off in a hurry. When I finished telling this often-told “war story,” my brother said, “I didn’t know you were over there.” That’s when the lightbulb went off that I needed to write my stories down, and Mogadishu was the first story I wrote.
Discovering Aviation Therapy
My self-published memoir, Ready For Takeoff – Stories from an Air Force Pilot, was a great project, and I really enjoyed reliving the memories from the pages of my logbook and reconnecting with lifelong friends. I mainly felt like I was writing “our stories” and not my stories.
After completing the first draft, I sent various chapters out to friends involved in those chapters. I told them that I didn’t want the book to come out and for our friends to say, “That’s BS. It didn’t happen that way.”
I heard back from many Air Force friends that I knew from 1984 to 2004. Some told me details I either didn’t know or had forgotten, but I gave them credit for their recollections. One of my copilots was thrilled to know that his name would be in a book. Another said his mom always told him he should write down his stories, so he gave her my book and told her, “Here you go!”
The exercise of writing has also been enlightening, as the process unfolded. In my autobiographical Chapter 1, I tell about my little sister raising not one, but two horses when she was a shy teenager. I thought that she enjoyed equine therapy at its finest. Then it dawned on me: I gained self-confidence and came out of my shell because of aviation. I benefited from Aviation Therapy.
From Self-Publishing to the Big Stage
Once my self-published book, Ready For Takeoff, was complete in November 2022, I sent it out to numerous periodicals, both aviation magazines and professional journals, for their review. My greatest disappointment came when Air & Space Quarterly (of the Air and Space Smithsonian Museum) said their policies prevented them from reviewing or promoting self-published material, which had not been vetted by a publisher. I was determined at that point to get my story published.
In a stroke of luck, on a European River Cruise in April 2023, I met an author, Yi Shun Lai, a novelist from California. We later read each other’s books, and Yi Shun said she could tell from my first book that there was an undercurrent of perseverance and personal growth throughout my story. She then encouraged me to rewrite my manuscript and join her in November 2023 at a Writer’s Conference in Kansas City.
There, I met Christine Wolf, an editor from Chicago who specializes in memoirs and non-fiction, but she knew nothing about aviation or the military. She loved the manuscript and my stories. After her first read, she told me she was sad when she came to the last chapter because she didn’t want it to end.
Aviation Therapy: A Story of Perseverance
After answering her probing questions about what pilots think and what our families endured, the newly bolstered book was shopped to various 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 there are two release cycles for books: Spring and Fall, and that their plate for Spring 2025 Releases was full. After 15 months, Aviation Therapy — Stories of Perseverance and Personal Growth is now ready for purchase in paperback, e-book, and audio, which I recorded at Austin Audio Lab.
Air and Space Quarterly enjoyed the new synopsis of the published book and wrote to me in September 2025 to say they would not only review it but also feature it in the upcoming Winter issue (January 2026), which would include an in-depth interview with me. Even the writing of this second memoir 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 on Amazon.
