“Would you like to come up front and sit in the cockpit?”

Back in the late nineteen-forties and the nineteen-fifties, my father would fly commercially from time to time.  He flew with airlines that have since passed by the wayside such as Piedmont (1948-1989) Allegheny (1939-1979) and Eastern (1926-1991) that flew out of Huntington or Charleston, WV.  

As a commercial pilot and flight instructor, he was a long-time member of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, the AOPA (See the post for June 16, 2012, below).  In those days, people dressed up to fly, and my father would always pin the discrete AOPA pin in the lapel of his suit jacket.  

Not infrequently, during the flight, if one of the flight attendants noticed the AOPA pin, she—they were all women in those days—asked  my father, “Would you like to come up front and sit in the cockpit?”  Of course, my father accepted the invitation and would be escorted to the flight deck where he would take the copilot’s seat and “fly” the DC-3, or Martin 4-0-4 or Convair, or whatever it was, for a few minutes.