The ribbons don’t fly it, the hours in your logbook don’t fly it, and your pride flies it straight into the ground faster than anything else I can name.

When the emergency comes, and it will come, the airplane will not care how good you used to be.

It will only care whether you can see what is actually in front of you, right now, clearly, without flinching, and whether you can trust the person sitting next to you enough to do your half and let them do theirs.

She told them, without naming it as her own, about a cockpit over the Atlantic where a captain had done the hardest thing a person in command is asked to do, which was to trust a stranger in the middle of a crisis because the crisis left no time to do anything else.