Our guest on this episode is Retired Alaska Airlines Captain David J. Smith.

I first met David Back in 1983, when he began training as a newly hired pilot at Alaska Airlines. That meeting resulted in David becoming my longtime friend. David has an interesting story about our first meeting, which I will neither confirm or deny.

David was one of the small numbers of civilian pilots who were able to break into the airlines back in the late 1970s. At that time, more than 70 percent of the pilots hired by US Airlines had a Military background. A few years after David joined Braniff Airlines, the company fell into financial hardship. David was furloughed, and the company later went out of business.

His second chance to land an Airline job came when someone told him that a small company named Alaska Airlines was hiring pilots. David did well at the hiring interview, and the rest was history.