How I Made it to “The Show”:
THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED Captain Donald E. Lyle, Southwest Airlines
I have had the honor and privilege to be a professional aviator for 40 years, it is all I ever wanted to do. I do not have 20/20 vision and had been told multiple times that I would never make it. Yet here I am a little over a year from mandatory retirement from a U.S. major airline at age 65 and trying to see what the next chapter in my aviation career looks like. I am living proof that if you want something bad enough, you will make it happen. I did it, and so can you. When I was in fourth grade, we were studying flight and our science book had an extra credit assignment: talk to a pilot and ask them various questions about the topics in the chapter. Pretty jazzed, I took the book home and asked my mom where we could find a pilot to talk to in our hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. She called United Airlines at Eppley Airfield in Omaha, and they told her to come down the next Saturday afternoon and that they would have someone for me to talk to. Waiting in the operations office with my sheet of questions, a DC-6 crew walked in the door from the ramp and came right over to me. The Captain introduced himself, the First Officer, and the Flight Engineer and asked if I was Don. He said that he understood that I was working on a science project, and the three of them would sit there and answer every question I had. I am positive they had no idea the impact that a few minutes of their time had on a kid in Omaha, Nebraska on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Never underestimate the potential of spending a couple of minutes talking with someone.
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In my sophomore year in high school, we had a science elective called Aerospace 1, which was private ground school. The teacher, Anders Christensen, was also a flight instructor and would sign you off to take the private written exam if you passed the course. The class had an optional flight where a student would plan and fly one leg of a triangle in a C-172 with Mr. Christensen and two other students. That was all it took. Near the end of the semester, I asked Mr. Christensen where I could study aviation in college, and he told me about the aviation program at the University of North Dakota. My dad and I visited UND the following summer and I knew then that I was on my way to Grand Forks after high school. During enrollment for classes the summer before my first year at UND, an Air Force Captain was making the rounds among the incoming first-year students to encourage them to sign up for Air Force ROTC. I told him that I was going to major in aviation, and he advised me to consider something else because “…you will never make it because you wear glasses.” My dad was sitting next to me and smiled, the Captain had no idea to whom he was talking. I graduated from UND in 1980 with a degree in Aviation Administration, a commercial/instrument/multi, a CFII, and about 1300 flight hours. I have had the honor of serving my country in the United States Navy and Naval Reserve as an F-14 Radar Intercept Officer (RIO). I was a Naval Flight Officer (NFO) because I did not have 20/20 vision and thus did not meet the physical requirements to be a Navy Pilot. I continued to fly on the civilian