CHAPTER
1

GLAMOUR FOR ONE, PLEASE—A TOTALLY “NORMAL” FIRST DAY OF WORK

I had certainly imagined the whole glamour thing to be very different.

Pilot for a private jet airline—it was a job that promised new adventures every single day. Insights into the life of the rich and the beautiful, of the stars and starlets: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Tom Ford or Karl Lagerfeld would have me fly them to Nice, London, or Paris. New encounters with the jet set every single day, a veritableWho’s Who of society—and even if I were just their pilot, it would definitely be exciting and always new. This, roughly, is how I imagined my first job after completing the training.

Beautiful, high-quality things have always had an almost magical appeal to me, and in private aviation, that much was certain, I would meet the people who could afford such things. Because if you have sufficient cash to hire a plane and jet from one continent to another, for a weekend of shopping, glamour will also find its place in your life in other ways. The less varied humdrum work at one of the many scheduled flight providers was rather less appealing to me at the time. Instead, I preferred to fly “the celebrities” while getting a little taste of their world. It would somehow be very sexy, that first job of mine, I was sure of that.

So, my first duty was . . . pretty sobering. It had been a few weeks since I had signed my employment contract with a Berlin-based private aviation company. That’s when the waiting game started—initially, waiting to finally have my license issued by the relevant authority. Then, having received this, waiting to be included in the new roster. Finally—unexpected and all of a sudden—the day arrived, at long last. I was woken by a call on my cell phone at 6:30 a.m.; a first officer had gone sick and an immediate replacement needed to be found. How soon could I get to the airport? I decided to wing it. With little planning or organization, I threw whatever I could lay my hands on into my suitcase. I hadn’t been told how long I would be away, so I didn’t know what I was going to need. I quickly ironed my uniform—only to spend the whole trip to the airport trying to remember if I had turned the iron off. I’m sure that’s a worry many people have in those kinds of moments. It’s baseless, of course—it’s just that we have too much time to think about it. And that doesn’t necessarily change once you’re onboard the plane. But this time, I would be in the cockpit, so would soon be otherwise occupied. (My house was still standing when I got back; I had turned the iron off.)

I met the rest of the crew at the General Aviation Terminal (GAT) of Berlin Schönefeld airport. There were three of us: the captain, a Polish stewardess,