“I need current proficiency, not memories.”

Put yourself in his seat for a moment, because I did.

He was a commercial captain, trained his whole career to distrust exactly this — the confident stranger, the improviser, the person who says trust me in a crisis.

Everything in his profession is built to keep amateurs and cowboys out of the cockpit, and here one had walked in wearing a green sweater, claiming eighteen months of rust and a fighter’s résumé, at the precise moment his own airplane and his own body count were both running against him.

Saying yes to me was its own kind of risk.