On the first Monday in November 1972, Francis Doherty found himself facing a personnel manager for Western Airlines. He’d spent close to a year flying Army classified missions over Laos and Cambodia in a single-engined Cessna “Bird Dog,” watching the body bags of Special Forces operators stack up at his base while the roster of his fellow pilots continued to attenuate via the seemingly random finger of death from below, AK-47s and Chinese 51-caliber anti-aircraft rifles punching holes in wings, cockpits, bodies, and faces. Now, he wanted to do something very different: hop a Boeing 737 jet from city to city in a job that his father, a 747 pilot during the glamor years at TWA, had nonetheless self-deprecatingly described as being “little more than a bus driver.”