Why This Airline Assault Series Is Moving to Substack
I want to continue covering this important unfolding story involving people I’ve come to deeply respect
TW: Brief mentions of S.A.
I first reported on the commercial airline industry in September of 2021. I wrote a two-part, 10,000-word series about a pilot I once knew and viewed as a friend for a brief time.
I wrote of how we met for a weekend blind date in the late 1990s after a mutual friend set us up, of oysters and champagne consumed on the rolling hills of Jackie Kennedy’s childhood estate in tony Newport, R.I., of my date’s reputation as an excellent pilot. I wrote that he was a gentleman, about how we had an innocently bucolic weekend and then kept in touch, about fond memories of him inviting — then cajoling — me weeks later to go on a romantic trip with him to the Caribbean.
I wrote about how his sudden, violent death a few years after that made him as much a victim as anyone who lost their lives that day.
Before I wrote the story, I contacted people close to him to ask one vital question: Can you tell me a reason I shouldn’t write about this?
Like a wedding where the guests are warned to speak now or forever hold their peace, like that last safety check before you bring it in for a landing, I had a sharp awareness that I’d known the pilot for only a couple of years while he was alive. That famous saying rang in my head: You don’t know what you don’t know.
I asked people who were close to him for decades for reasons why not.
No one gave me any.
And so I posted a melancholic, glowing, fierce defense of the pilot and his skills and his character.
Within days, the messages began. First in a trickle, then a flood. They found me everywhere: Medium, Twitter, email, my website, LinkedIn, Facebook. Some were vile attacks on both me and the pilot using ugly, offensive language and making brutal (always anonymous) claims.
It was the earnest ones that got my attention. Dozens and dozens of people in the aviation industry saying, Consider you got it wrong. Here’s another side to the story — another side to the pilot. Women bravely sharing deeply personal and traumatizing accounts of sexual assault.
Pilots and engineers talking of trying to do their jobs while facing down male colleagues harassing them with the so-called NFCP Rule — No Females in The Cockpit. Dozens of messages about the cruelty and criminal behavior not only by my pilot, but also several others who still work at Qantas and American Airlines, to name two.
Once I realized I wasn’t being trolled by weirdos, I took the original stories down and began writing about ongoing assaults and harassment in the commercial aviation industry. These stories have been an extended do-over for me, a way to make up for the harm caused to women who had to read gauzy ode to their rapist. It’s a series that came with continuing news bumps I couldn’t ignore.
But I can no longer afford to work for free. The significant time and energy this has required is interfering with the writing and editing I do to make a living, so I’m trying Substack to see if that can be remedied. Anyone interested in staying with me and following this fight for justice all the way down is most welcome.
Content will be mostly free to non-paying subscribers for the foreseeable future, with paid subscribers receiving monthly exclusive and/or personalized content.
If you find yourself reading this ongoing series regularly, please consider a paid subscription.
There is so much more work to be done, so many more voices to be heard, so much accountability to push for. There are pilots still working and assaulting women (and men? I haven’t heard from any male victims, but I know they exist). There are major commercial airlines still harboring known abusers. It’s no time to let up.
The stories I’ve written so far with the information victims, witnesses and advocates have shared with me have received thousands of views, and I know there are people wanting to give oxygen to this ongoing search for justice. To light it up. To yank it out of the shadows.
I hope you stay with me at The Landing, a safe place for anyone who has fallen victim to a predator, whether out of the aviation industry or in it, from ground crew to flight crew to cockpit crew. Come here to read about your colleagues’ struggles, challenges and most of all, their victories. Keep sharing and keep pushing.
TOMORROW: Exclusive update on an American Airlines flight attendant who was assaulted on the job — you won’t believe the latest chapter in her story.
