Mark Davis landed that airplane.

She was the second pair of hands that let a frightened, exhausted, outnumbered captain fly as if he were not alone.

She was insistent about this distinction, then and forever after, and it was not false modesty.

It was the most important true thing she knew about her whole profession, and the thing the hero stories always got exactly backward.

The stories wanted a single remarkable person who stepped forward and saved everyone, because that is the shape a story likes, and it is a lie, and it is a dangerous lie, because it teaches the young pilots who hear it to reach for individual glory in the exact moments when individual glory gets people killed.