I realized only after we got back from Fairbanks that when I was taking pictures of the Company it had been ten years since I quit - since we all quit. One of the things that really struck me while I was standing there was that I wasn't thinking so much about the guys who were dead, but just all of us who were gone. The buildings look exactly the same - exactly - and the ramp is the same. The planes that are parked there are falling apart (some are just pieces of planes which was a bit hard to take as I remembered them flying everyday) but that wasn't what really bothered me. It was standing in the exact same spot that I used to run across a dozen times a day ten years before and seeing no on - no one at all - that was very very sobering. I could still hear us out there - echoes of us. And I could see us as we were. And that's when I realized how gone we were from the Company and how over it is. How that whole part of my life is forever over.

That's how I found my final chapter.

I didn't really want to quit my job, but I did because I was so tired of how hard it was. It was very stressful - enormously stressful - and the constant battles to get the job done every damn day (not to mention all the personal infighting) just got to be too much. Having said that though, I remember a conversation I had with my stepfather who flew in SE Asia during the Vietnam War. (He didn't fly in Vietnam, but in other "unofficial" areas of operation.) He was in the air force and believes war is a tragic thing, but told me that flying in that place and time was the most interesting aviation job he ever had. And I know what he meant because that is how I feel about the Company. Everything aviation-related I have done, before and since, pales in comparison. I worked for another Company for awhile (I was in grad school by then as well and researching crashes) and helped a third operation get started. So I was interacting with a lot of the same people. But the rush was gone as I was no longer running Ops, no longer part of a small team running the show everyday; no longer so integral to all those successes and failures everyday.

I was out of it all the minute I walked out the door in 1997. But standing on that ramp two weeks ago I could see myself running out to park one of the planes, to talk to my bosses, to argue with a pilot or catch the cargo guys and change a load. Planes taxiing all around and I was right there and I was in it - I was part of it. I was supposed to be there. It sounds crazy but I was in my element and I don't know that I've been there since.

We were such a tight group of people, and then we were gone....then all the infighting pulled us apart. And some of us don't even speak to each other anymore, some have disappeared, and some are dead.

No one believes our stories but each other and we are so split up across the country that the stories are rarely told now; they are being forgotten. And maybe that's why I'm okay with writing this memoir because it's just another way to remember who I was - who we were - in 1993 and 94 and 95 and 96 and 97. We were really something special way back then and in spite of all the frustration and anger, I miss that. I miss being that kind of special.

Can you blame me?

(Post picture is of an aircraft flown and crashed by an Alaskan charter operator in 1997. Everyone on board survived this one. What's funny is that I don't even remember it; bizarrely enough it was a total nonevent.)