them $1.4m in scholarship money. I don’t know why our percentage is still so small. And just like when I
started, there are still people in society that don’t even know that female airline pilots exist.”
Bass suggests that some women might see it as a hard job to have alongside a family, but insists that she
didn’t find it so. She met Tom Stawicki in 1985, introduced by a mutual friend who worked at American
Airlines’ headquarters where he was in the finance department. By 1989 they were married, their son was
born in 1991 and their daughter the following year.
“I never missed an important event in their lives. That didn’t mean that I didn’t work hard to manipulate
my schedule to make that happen, but I never missed anything big. I wasn’t home every night, but my
husband was – he was the stabilising force in the marriage.”
Beverley and the crew, 15 September 2001, the
day they left GanderOn 11 September 2011, Captain Beverley Bass was in Paris on a layover from Charles de Gaulle to
Dallas/Forth Worth international airport. She received a phone call from operations: their plane had arrived
but was late coming in, so their departure was delayed by about an hour and a half.
A turning point, as Alan Bennett might have put it: subjunctive aviation. If they had left on time, they would
have reached US airspace before it enclosed the country like a protective net. They never would have
landed in Gander. Over international waters, out of range of air traffic control, pilots monitor a frequency
that Bass refers to as “air-to-air”, where pilots talk to pilots. A plane in front of Bass’s Boeing
communicated the message: a plane had hit one of the world trade centres.
“And my co-pilot and I were just sitting there having lunch,” Bass marvels. “We assumed it was a light
airplane, but couldn’t imagine what in the world had happened; we knew the weather was good. And that
was it. We didn’t even talk about it much more. We weren’t worried, we didn’t even think one thing about
it; just that it was unfortunate that a small plane would hit the world trade centre.”
With that came the word airliner, and the word terrorism. So now, life for us is changing. Gander control
called us and said, American 49, land your plane immediately in Gander, Newfoundland. And that’s when I
had to tell the passengers
About 20 minutes later, that same plane came back on to the frequency to tell them that the second tower
had been hit – and not by a light plane. “With that came the word airliner, and the word terrorism. So now,
life for us is changing. “For me, terrorism was something that happened somewhere else in the world. I had
no idea what that meant.”