The Airline Pilot Who Found Recovery in a 28-Day Treatment Center – Lyle P.

Now here's what we've really been waiting for. Congratulations to you all, and here's Lyle. Good evening. My name is Lyle, and I am an alcoholic. Happy birthday to everybody. That's quite a gathering, quite a group, especially the newcomers. Let me welcome you to Alcoholics Anonymous from the podium and tell you that I'm so glad you're here. Also let you know that I did not come here easily, so I'm glad that you're here. I wanted to thank Debbie and Kent for picking me up at the airport and for Claire for all the work that they've done. Everybody else has been a part of this thing so that I might come here and share an evening with you. First things first, how much time do I have here? I've been listening to all these rules and I sure as hell don't want to violate one of them. How much time? Forty-five minutes. We'll look at Ann. You're easy to look at. I'll do that. I got a timer here, so I'll go ahead and look at her. I'll just all do that when I stand here and look after you. It's only because I'm waiting for the sign. I got the letter laying all of this out telling me what was going to happen how much time I would have and I thought man these guys are really regimented here I wrote Claire a letter and I said I want you to be offended because I'm grinning as I write this but I said I can't remember the last time I walked into a bar and told the bartender And I'm going to be here between 45 and 50 minutes exactly. And I have a friend coming in with a sign in case I go a little over. So watch for her. A couple of disclaimers. Typically, I talk for an hour, hour and five minutes, something like that. I still leave out about 70% of the story, so I'm going to be as appropriate as I can tonight and try to kind of scrunch it up a little bit. I don't do a big drunk-a-log. I would like to. I think it's important for identification purposes, but I really don't have a lot of time to do that. Suffice it to say, mine is very much like yours. I drank a lot had a lot of blackouts I woke up places where I didn't intend to be didn't know where I was or what I was doing there got I lost cars along the way got in a number of scrapes and bars had two DUIs and unlike you folks I got an FUI That's flying under the influence for those of you I know it's California and I know where your minds may be going with that We're all probably guilty of the other Mine had some consequences involved to it One of the things that I do that I've heard some people object to is that I talk about my profession, what I did. The reason I do that is because it's part of the story. And the reason that I do that is if I didn't do that, if I hadn't been what I was, then none of the consequences and the fallout and the events that took place would have occurred. It's just that simple. And I was an airline pilot. I also want to make it clear that I don't believe we have prestige or status in this fellowship and this program. None. Zero. Zip. And that I was not an airline pilot who was a drunk. I was a trunk who had the good fortune to be an airline pilot. And that's an important part of the story. I'm going to mix the order up a little bit and I'm gonna start with what happened and then I'll go back and fill in the rest of it as best I can. I want to tell you that my sobriety date is March 7, 1990. When I got to treatment, it became a national event, by the way. So when I got the treatment and somebody said, well, if you can't remember your sobrietry date or your last drunk, maybe you haven't had it yet. And I thought, well, mine got celebrated by Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings, so I don't have any problem at all remembering mine. You may have a little struggle with yours, but I still see news clips every now and then about this. And for a while it was really quite painful. The media has a way of picking one particular shot, whether it's Michael Jackson or Monica Lewinsky or whatever it is, they show the one shot always over. Every time the subject comes up, they share that one shot. and they have one of me walking into a courtroom with my attorney, my wife and followed by two co-defendants and I commented one time that I had a particular personal struggle every time I saw that clip that it was quite painful and my wife said yeah she understood because she experienced the same thing and I was a little surprised by that and I said really? I said well can you see that? What happens? And she said, well, you know, they show that same one over and over and over. She said, I just know everybody in the country is going to think I only have that one dress. March 7th, 8th, and 9th are very intense days for me. And they, in effect, are like the three days of the Kennedy assassination in that at any moment on any of those days I can look at my watch and I know exactly where I was and what was taking place. March 7th was a very unusual day really because I was drinking with two crew members and I usually did not drink with crew members. But I was out with these two guys in a bar in Fargo, North Dakota in the afternoon and evening. I didn't drink with two crew members because, number one, I thought it was risky. Number two, I had reached the point where when I drank, if I went to a place and I sat down and ordered a drink, I looked around. If I didn' t like it, I left. And I had long since gotten to the point were the other folks drank way too slow. And as a matter of fact, the more I watched it, the embarrassed I got for them. And I thought, God, you know, I just used to get some of my friends and say, You guys getting old or what? No, we came in here to drink. You're going to drink? You're stacking up in front of you because I'm ordering. And I think, God. When I leave there, I think I just hope I never get like that. It's just so embarrassing. Man, I didn't. At any rate, this particular day was really unusual. So I was out with these two guys, and we drank quite heavy the afternoon and evening before this flight on March the 7th. And the next morning, bright and early, we showed up and we launched in a Boeing 727 with 58 passengers on board. Had been talked to by the FAA while I was up there. He seemed to think that – or at least the impression was that he wasn't going to stop us from flying, so we went. And the issue seemed to be whether or not we were drinking eight hours before the flight. I thought at that time that we were okay on that, and that was his only concern. As it happened, there was a lot more to it than just that. But got to Minneapolis on the morning of March the 8th, and by the time we landed, I walked off the airplane in uniform into a waiting crowd of people, airport police, FAA officials, and Northwest Airlines company officials. I have a particular reason for not leaving my airline anonymous. I've heard other pilots talk, and they talk about having flown for a major carrier. I don't do that for a reason. I hope by the time I've done the story you understand why that is. There have been several incidents since my thing 14 1⁄2 years ago, but no other pilot has ever gone to prison. No other pilot ever had the extreme consequences of the fallout that our situation created, and I hope that doesn't happen. But at that time, Northwest Airlines was the only major airline that did not have a program for alcoholic pilots. The other airlines had outstanding programs, programs that the rest of the corporations and industry business copied. They emulated that program. It was set up back in the 1970s, and it has been hugely successful, not because people are pilots but because it's heavily structured, monitored, and there's an awful lot of checks and cross-checks. And so the rate of recovery is extraordinarily high. Northwest didn't have one. They had said, we don't have any drunk pilots, alcoholic pilots, and if we did, we'd fire them. And it was a real dark age approach because everyone sitting here knows that we have alcoholics everywhere, every profession, under the bridges, in the Congress and the Senate, practicing medicine, in churches. We have them everywhere. Excuse me. And I know people in virtually every walk of life who are alcoholic, but that was Northwest's position at the time. March the 9th, I got home, and that was the day I entered treatment, about 24 hours from the time of the arrest. March the 8th, when I was arrested, was a day that, unlike any that I've ever lived through before or since, It was totally, absolutely, overwhelmingly traumatic. I had not lived my life, I didn't think, in such a way that I was going to watch it end like this. And I remember the horror, the shock, the trauma of that day. And many times feeling like I was having literally an out-of-body experience. I was watching this happen to someone and it just couldn't be me. This could not be happening. And yet, I would look around and I think, God Almighty, it is what's happening to me right now. And the one feeling that was immediately saturating was shame. Complete, total shame. I had been the standard bearer in my family with my kids, and I had preached things like do the honor country, character, honesty, integrity, do the right thing. I had been a stern, strict disciplinarian, and I had hammered home these ideas and these principles. And now I was beginning a journey that was going to put me in the deepest, darkest valley of my entire life with shame and disgrace, public humiliation and scorn. And it was just overwhelming, horribly overwhelming. So the next morning, I made my way through the Twin Cities Airport in Minneapolis-St. Paul on my way home to Atlanta. I had not been able to get home that evening. And I was in uniform, and every time somebody looked my way, as they quite often did when pilots walk by, I just flinched with shame. I thought, they know. They know or they soon will know. Everybody's going to know. I got home and had called my wife the night before, who had waited for me for four hours at the airport. I was supposed to have been home that night and had forgotten about it in the light of everything that was taking place. I left a message and said, you know, there's been a disaster and I think I've lost my job. I'll be home the first flight in the morning. I got through the airport quickly. I didn't want anybody to see me or stop me. I knew all the Northwest personnel, the groomers, the baggage handlers, the mechanics, everyone. I knew them all because we used to laugh and talk and visit with them. I didn't want anybody to see me or say anything to me or stop me. I saw my wife Barbara sitting at the curb, and I've never told a story about what I did and haven't said that I felt like I had to climb over the curb to get in the car with her. I could not look at her. I just couldn't look. As we pulled away, all I could say is, Honey, I'm so sorry. And she said, she had a soft South Texas accent, And she said, who better than I could possibly understand how you feel right now? We drove home in silence, as I recall. I didn't want to talk about anything. She dropped me off at the house. She went to work. And I went inside. It was deathly quiet. And I called a doctor who was the only doctor I knew at the time was a family therapist. And I told him that there had been an emergency and that I needed to see him immediately. And he hadn't come in in an hour. An hour later, I had driven to his office. I look back on that, and I'm thinking, as I recall all this, I'm saying, you know, I was so mentally and emotionally shredded. I was just devastated. I had no business driving a car. I could barely function. But I drove over to his office, andI walked in, and I told him what had happened, and I remember the look of shock and surprise on his face. Every time I tell the story, I relive it. It's like a movie in my mind that's going on as I'm talking to you, and I see it again. And I remember him shaking his head and said, God, Lyle. He said, this is horrible. This is just horrible. He walked around the side of his desk and he said, maybe this is what had to happen. And it was something that I did not understand. I was going to hear several comments before the day was over that I simply couldn't process, did not understanding at all. That was the first one. He left and he came back and he says, I've just talked to another doctor. He said I was on staff with him many years ago at a treatment center. and he said he wants to see you at 6 o'clock tonight now this is now March the 9th, it's a Friday and I thought my God, 6 o´clock at night and this guy was a very prominent doctor recovering alcoholic and cocaine addict and psychiatrist and certified in addiction medicine which I'd never heard of at the time and the idea that they had set this appointment conveyed a certain sense of urgency and importance to me I knew they were treating us very seriously Barbara and I drove over there to his office. We walked inside. She stayed out in the waiting area. I went into his office and sat. I don't know if I cannot, I have no recollection, memory of what took place there. I don'T know ifI was in there five minutes or an hour in five minutes, nor do I know anything he said or asked me. What I do know is that I had reached the end, that Ihad no means or method or motive to try to hedge my answers. That when he asked me a question, I answered as honestly as I could. I remember clearly, though, him looking at me at some point in this process and he said, Lyle, you're an alcoholic and you need to go into treatment tonight. And I can tell you that from the time I first heard that word alcoholic and from the first time I ever knew what it meant, I've hated it and despised it. I had two parents who were alcoholics and I saw what that meant. And I hated and despise that. I grew up in a native community. I'll talk about it a little bit. And I saw my Indian people who were alcoholics and I hated it. I was embarrassed and ashamed by them. And I was never going to be an alcoholic. The thing that I remember most about his statement to me was that I had no internal reaction to it. Nothing struck. And all of a sudden, that word is being applied to me. I think that probably in the 24 hours or so since the arrest, with the limited capacity that I had mentally at that time, I thought the only thing that I'm aware of is that my life is gone. It's destroyed. It's forever shot. People at Northwest who were fired for alcohol offenses never came back. Careers were over. It was fatal. It was immediate. It was irrevocable. And my life was done. And it was because I was in a bar drinking alcohol when I wasn't supposed to be there. So I think, maybe even subconsciously or at some level I had hooked up all these things and I maybe even knew at that point that I was an alcoholic. I said to the doctor when he said that, I said, I don't have a problem with that. I said, I thought you would probably tell me that. And I said however, I just got home tonight and I said really what I'd like to do, please is just go home I said let Barbara hang on to me and just please let my mind uncoil let me just absorb what's happened please and he said you need to go into treatment tonight and I stood for just a second I guess that was my first lesson in willingness because I remember looking at him and thinking, why did I come all the way over here if I'm not going to do what he's telling me? And I looked at him for just a second. I said, okay. So we drove back across Atlanta to a treatment center I'd never heard of. And I walked in with the clothes on my back and marched the night. As we made the final turn, it was dark. We made the finally turn about 8 o'clock at night and the headlights swept the sign as I turned the corner. and this sign said Anchor Hospital Hospital for Alcoholism and Chemical Dependency and I hit the brakes and stopped and I sat there and I looked at that sign and I thought God Almighty this is how my life ends 51 years old in a treatment center for alcoholics and I just sat and looked at it for a moment and for just the briefest of moments my mind kind of flashed through a lot of my past highlights of life, accomplishments things that I was very proud of and it's like somebody wiped them all out and they counted for nothing they were gone I had no self worth as a human being none, zero I put the car in gear and we went on down the hill and I went inside this treatment center And I had a very intense 28-day experience there. I went in. Again, it was cloaked in shame. The first week, nobody knew the color of my eyes. I would not look up, could not lookup. Everywhere I went, my head was down. I walked with my head down. I sat in groups with my hand down. I wouldn't look at anybody when they talked to me or when I talked to them. And there was one event that took place the morning after I'd gone in. And it wasn't funny at the time. It was a little humorous now, but it's like many things that aren't very funny at the time, but a few years later I'm laughing and chuckling. I had gone out in the morning. It was Saturday. And I'd walked out back in the same clothes I'd come in in. And it was kind of a recreation area. And I didn't know anything about this hospital or the people in it or anything else. And we were five minutes south of the Atlanta airport. And an airplane took off, 727. and I immediately turned like I always had and always will and looked and it was very close and as I looked at it the feeling hit me you'll never see the inside of a cockpit again and I began to get sick and I could feel everything coming up and I choked and swallowed and turned around and walked off and I walked around to this recreation area and there were some chairs there and they were spaced a couple feet apart I remember out of the corner of my eye I saw somebody over here sitting there but I didn't look at him didn't speak to him I didn't want to talk to anybody. I didn' t want anybody talking to me. And I sat down in the chair and this voice over here says to me, or he says, I don' t know if he' s talking to m e or not, but he says you know if I only had 30 days to live this is where I'd want to be. Now, I'd only been there about 8 hours and I hadn' t reached that level of whatever and I didn''t turn to look at this guy But I didn't know if he was talking to me or not. And I said, really? And he said, yeah, because every goddamn day here seems like a year. Never talked to that guy again as long as I was there. I guess it was his version of one day at a time. But I still don't know who he was. I never looked his way. I had an amazing treatment experience. I became suicidal in the first few days. The media had it very quickly. Within two or three days, I was all over the media. I was the lead story every time it came on Atlanta. It was splashed all over national TV. Went to Europe, went to the Orient. Everybody was hearing about it. Everybody was sharing about it, and now everybody in there knew, and the shame was just exponentially magnified. I thought it was unbearable before, now it's really unbearably. And I became suicidal. I didn't think I had the capacity for that. The only time I thought about suicide was in Vietnam and I wondered if I'd allowed myself to be captured when I was flying over there if I was shot down. But I became suicidal and decided that the pain was so great I was going to make it in. and I was past the romancing stage, and that was actually going a bit. And someplace in that process, I had this, what I can only refer to as a God-given moment of clarity, and I thought, you know, I did think about my wife and family. I thought this is the only thing that's worse than what's already happened. They'll never survive that. So in the treatment process,I began to think more about living and dying, and that wasn't an amazing thing for me to be able to move into. Suddenly, though, we're getting news of legal consequences. Nobody even, none of the attorneys that I talked to, union attorneys or airline attorneys, knew anything about legal situations. A week to the day that I'd gone into treatment, it was announced on TV that I had been fired by Northwest Airlines and I should have been. It was announced that my licenses had all been revoked and they should have be revoked. I had lost my FAA medical certificate because I was diagnosed as an alcoholic and I should have lost that also. So I was stripped of everything within a week. I was ripped. Within a month, I was broke. I never watched TV. I couldn't go near it. It was too painful. But patients would relay all this information to me naturally. I had an amazing experience in the first week of treatment. I'm going to stop there and then kind of go back if I can and come back here and pick up. I'm getting a little farther ahead of myself. I'm watching this clock, and I'm not managing well. But let me go back and flesh in a little bit and tell you that I was born in Wichita, Kansas in September 1938, so I'm 72. And you guys aren't doing the math. I'll be 66 next month. It's always fun to watch that happen because I do the math when I'm sitting out there. But I was brought up in a family and I was one to a very blue-collar family, two very hardworking parents who were both alcoholics. And we were four. I grew up in Wichita, lived on the edge of Wichitar on a World War II housing project called Plainview, and there was a Native American community in there, and I was an active member of that community. Ethnically, I'm a mix of several different things. The two strongest are Comanche and Irish, which form a very interesting drinking combination. Or so I'm told I grew up in the songs and the powwows And the dances of the community I was very active in there By the time I was 14 My parents both, the alcohol had just taken over And was raging through the family And they divorced And shortly thereafter Each one of them had been married and divorced two more times I bounced from family to family Had a lot of anger a lot of clashing with step-parents and step-siblings, all this while I was going through high school. I was taking advantage of it. I squandered a lot OF academic opportunity, and I was a good student when I applied myself, but I just kind of goofed off going through school. I graduated when I was 17, and the thing where I came from, not too many folks went to college from the area I came from, and The Deal was you married your 18-year-old high school sweetheart and you went to work at Boeing, to each of Cessna and one of the other aircraft factories there. And I had decided to join the service. I didn't have an 18-year-old sweetheart, so I was going to join the service, didn't know what I was gonna join. A buddy of mine came back from the Marine Corps, and we spent an afternoon getting drunk, drinking beer. He was right out of boot camp, and he spent the entire afternoon and evening telling me about these horrible, masochistic, cruel things that Marine drill instructors do to their recruits. And I said, well, I'm not gonna do that. And I thought I had an opportunity, I suppose, early on to recognize that maybe my thinking wasn't right because I thought, God, I just can't wait to go try that. So within a day or so off I had gone, I'd signed up with a Marine recruiter. I turned 18 and I went to boot camp. I hear a lot of people come out and talk about how they never fit in. You know, they never felt that they fit. And that's their experience and I understand that. And I had not been anything particularly more than average up to that point. I went into boot camp with the idea of simply surviving and I really snapped into the routine and I fit. I really fit. And by the time we graduated, I graduated as the number two guy in the platoon. I got a set of PFC stripes. It was one of about three or four that got those stripes. Went to Camp Pendleton and I was just extraordinarily proud. Man, I had this heavy rank on my sleeve and my buddies were all slick sleeves. And I'm sitting there on guard duty one night inside because I'm acting corporal to the guard due to my rank. And my buddies are outside in the rain and I'm standing there thinking, leaning back. I'm thinking, you know, Lyle, you've got a real good deal going here. The rate you're moving up general can't be too far away, and I may have a real fine career here. So I got snapped into the routine, and then I stayed. Four and a half years later, I came walking in, and I was told that I was the only guy in the unit that was qualified to go to a new aviation program that would allow enlisted Marines to test out. And I had some very high entry scores, and so I opted to go for this. And then in the midst, I passed the test. But then they told me about half, 50% or so are going to wash out. And everybody else coming in is going to have to have a minimum of two years college. And that scared the heck out of me because I can't handle failure. I don't handle value well. I don' t do it well. And I'm thinking if they're going to lose half, if they' re going to loose half and I'm competing with college guys statistically, that means I'm going to be one of them that doesn' t make it. I finally decided to go. I went home to Wichita. They were having a powwow. I went to it. They gave me a special dance because I was going away. And I drove all the way to Pensacola thinking to myself, I cannot fail, I cannot failure, I can not fail. I cannot go back to my ending community as a failure. And I knew that if I was successful in this 18-month process, I was gonna get a set of gold wings, the gold bars and be a commissioner in court also. And I almost couldn't dream that day. I went through the process, scared to death, working hard. And I had learned that from my parents. My parents, I think it's important to acknowledge from the podium, my parents weren't just drunk all the time. They taught me some really good things. And they taught me by their own example how to work hard, and I knew how to work hard and I did. At the end of about a year, I left the Florida area and went to South Texas for Advanced Jet Training Command. Went through four phases of flight training and was always at the top of my class. Always thought it was luck. Was convinced it was administrative error or luck. And that I was eventually going to wash out. I knew that, I thought. And I was watching guys leave all the time, heartbroken. and sad and sometimes crying. Went to Texas, and the first night in town I got drunk with a bunch of my buddies and they said let's go into town and go to this drive-in and I went in there and they wanted to go after some girls and I was never very gutsy with that and they did and I didn't and I hung back and finally I walked up to this car I thought I'd had enough to drink and ran into a girl and she turned and I made an ass out of myself I was tongue tied I didn' t know what to say but like I said I remember she turned and looked at me And I said, God, you've got the prettiest brown eyes I've ever seen. And that was it. That was it, and she sat and looked at me, and I just turned around and walked away. And March the 9th that I went into treatment was my 27th wedding anniversary. Past March the ninth was my 41st anniversary to that girl with the brown eyes. So it has worked out better for me than her probably. She pinned my wings on me On February the 25th, 1963 We immediately had two kids Bang, that fast Eight days less than a year apart And I never got so tired of anything I was stationed down here at El Toro I never Got so tired Of anything More than people coming up and saying You can't No, Protestants can do this too Off I went to Vietnam Flew a lot of missions came back with some medals and ribbons, and did very well. My drinking was picking up and escalating, but not so you could tell me from the rest of the guys yet. Came back, decided to get out of the Marine Corps, and that was after 11 1⁄2 years, and I'd been a lifer, and it was a hard, hard, heart decision to make. My family came first, and I had looked at it and said, You know, I'm going to be gone four to six years from this family. I never want a family like the one I grew up in. I've got to have some stability and some security, so I'll get out. And two weeks later, I was in class at Northwest Airlines. For nearly 22 years at Northwest, I had almost the same kind of career and reputation. I had become quite a drinker and a partier, but a lot of us were. That was what we did and we were supposed to, I always thought. You fly hard, you play hard. It's part of the persona. But what was happening to me was my tolerance was greatly, greatly increasing, a lot faster than those around me. That's why I was feeling sorry for them because they couldn't keep up. But until this thing happened, well, let me back up. After we got to the airline, we had adopted a little girl. We had talked about that even before we got married and adopted this beautiful little chip wall girl, 17 days old when she came to our house. I thought it would be great for Barbara to have a little daughter. I had these two boys and didn't have any idea what daughters do to their dads, of course. And she just became the center of my universe. God I loved her so much and she couldn't walk past me without me telling her to come over and give me a hug and when I was approaching time to be a captain I passed it up because of her wanted to be home for her was drinking quite heavy but I was altering and moderating my drinking patterns quite a bit and I went to go to Chicago to take a test to become a captain and she ran away that day She knew that Barbara was taking me to the airport, and she packed her stuff and left. I had some help with friends. I found out about it the following day. I panicked, blurted out all these instructions about where to go, where to look, who to call. But by the time I got home, everything had changed, and I hated her worse than anything. God Almighty, I hated it. And within two days, I had emptied the house of all of her furniture. That was all gone. Everything that she'd ever owned or touched was gone. I went to the safety deposit box, ripped up her adoption papers, went to an attorney, gave him $500 and disowned her, and then tried to annul the adoption, and I couldn't. I was in this absolutely seething hatred cauldron of rage. And as I looked around at this whole thing, I thought, you know what, Barbara isn't handling this too well. She probably needs a therapist. So that's where this doctor came from that I had called. We saw him every week for about two years. And I didn't like talking much about my daughter, but I would. But I remember saying to him one time when he said something to me about her, I said, I'm going to tell you something, doctor. I said I would rather hate than hurt. That was the secret of how I had done everything in my life. That was how I dealt with everything. He told me, he said, that worked for you when you were a kid, but he said if you continue it will destroy you. And I did not buy it. So, when this thing happened, that's kind of where we were. I was two years into this thing and my daughter hadn't seen her, wouldn't hear of her, wouldn't talk to her, wouldn't allow anyone to breathe her name to me. In the first week of treatment, with everything else that's going on around me, for some reason, I was in a group and I began to talk about my daughter that day. I had never cried before. Didn't even cry at my parents' funerals. They both died from alcoholism. I never cried at either of the females because it was not okay for me to cry. I broke down that day and I cried in this group, and eight or ten people saw it. I felt naked, and I looked at it, and then I said, That's one of the most important things that ever happened to me in treatment. Within a couple of days, I was able to write to Barbara. I said get a hold of Dawn and tell her let's put this family back together again. There were no visitors and phone calls at the treatment center, but they thought it was such an amazing breakthrough they'd allow it to happen. So she came up from Florida. I hadn't seen her in two years. She'd gotten married. I didn't know her last name. I walked into a day room of the treatment center for alcoholics, and there she was. And I had forgotten how little she was." Off to the side were the two doctors. They had asked if they could please come see this because they did not believe that this was possible, not based on my previous attitudes. So they were off to the site. And I walked in, and I can't tell you what it felt like to walk over and put my arms around her and tell her how much I loved her instead of how much i hated her. So the family came back that day, and the relationship was healed. I got out of treatment and immediately went to Minnesota and was immediately arraigned for a trial up there. I had an advantage on the other two guys. I was an alcoholic. They were not. I could go to AA meetings at night and charge up and get through the next day in courtroom, which is an incredible, unbelievable experience if you've never done it. I had another advantage. I never shared. I just sat in the meetings and took in the energy and was glad to be there in a safe place so that I could refuel for the next day. And the trial was over. That's driving me crazy, Ann. If I have away ten minutes, I'm going to go out and go, okay, where am I? Where am I ? I don't mind looking at you, but the signs are distracting. At any rate, I went through a three-week trial up there and experienced horror and terror. Every time I turned around, they were sticking microphones and cameras in my face. And I was mantring the serenity prayer over and over and until it could begin to work, until I could just release some of the fear. People up there later told me, they said, you were different from the other two. I don't know if I was or not. I didn't see it and I didn' t feel it, but somebody saw it and thought it. We were quickly found guilty as I knew we would be, and I knew that that meant mandatory prison. Mandatory prison. No chance of probation has suspended since. Not under the guidelines. Several months later, we went back for the sentencing. The judge had then informed the three attorneys that he, not the prosecutor, but he was going to accelerate and increase the sentences. Guidelines were 12 months to 18 months. I was the captain. I knew I was goingto get 18 months, and all of a sudden we have a new experience in horror, and I'd had plenty of them. I'd felt them all the way to the bone marrow. It had become a familiar feeling, and it came again that morning. Went in there a day and a half later. so scared I couldn't, I could hardly walk I stood up to talk and my only prayer was please let me speak from the heart and I talked about being grateful to be sober, about being grateful for the things that had happened inside my family, about the acceptance of responsibility and that I had always done that and I couldnít change what had happened even the day before much less months before to everybodyís surprise he announced a sentence of 16 months on me instead of 18 And everybody was dazzled by that. Now, I wasn't real anxious to go waltzing off into prison for something like 16 months, but it was a lot better than what I was thinking. And the other two guys got quelled. He also did something that no one else expected, and he said, I had given my personal effects to Barbara when I walked through the doors that day and said, I don't think I'll be back. He said, I'm going to let you guys, you three gentlemen, remain free until the appeals are made their way because this is the first of its kind ever case with a lot of complex legal issues. The other two guys opted to stay out. But I had learned in here that I deal with life on life's terms, life on wife's terms. I said, now, I've been convicted. I will go to jail now. I'll go to prison now. It stunned him. He didn't know for a moment what to say because he hadn't expected it. He says to this day no other defendant has ever done that before or since. So December the 5th of 1990, I walked into federal prison. Told my kids, I said I'm as scared as you are, but I can't come out the back door until I go in the front. So I served 424 days in there, one day at a time. A lot of experiences in there. I don't even bother to talk about them from the podium. Had a guy come up to me one time and said, 14 months? I spent 21 years now. I said, good for you. You win. It's a lot of different things to different people. But it was not a fun time for me. I came out. I was broke. The most notorious pariah in all of aviation. Everybody in commercial aviation knew my name, and they knew about the Northwest Flight 650 incident. I had been stripped of everything. I began to think or dream about flying again. As I checked into it, the FAA said, if you want to fly again, you'll have to start at the very bottom with a private license, which I had never had. I'd come out of the Marine Corps and then given a commercial license with an instrument ticket. No one that I knew believed that was possible. I had hoped that I would only have to perform to an ATP license, which was the highest the FAA gave and the one that I held. And in and of itself, I thought that was impossible. But to go back and be four of them, no one believed that was possible. Except in here, I had learned if I do one thing at a time, one day at a Time, one step at atime, I can do anything if I choke it down and keep it small. Had I looked at the panorama of everything, I wouldn't have even attempted it, especially in light of the idea that no one believed it was possible. Using the principles and the concepts of this program and using the support of the fellowship and everything else that I had, those were the only resources I had left. I went back and ten and a half months later I passed all four of those exams. Now then, I still had to do the flying. I looked at the flying, it was going to cost $10,000 to $20,000. I'd been broke since the first 30 days. I had no money. I was working in the treatment center that had saved my life. I was making $6.75 an hour, just barely staying alive. There was no way I could do this. And I got a phone call from one of the pilots in Northwest. He had a flight skill and wasn't aware of it. And he said, I want you to come up here and go through my flight skill free. I was under 13 conditions of probation for three years. I had to coordinate with Georgia Department of Corrections and Minnesota Department of corrections. I went up there. I spent 44 days in the summer of 1993. And I flew 78 hours in 30 days. It was rained out 14 days, but never put steady. And I got four licenses back, two of them in one day. Who was going to hire me? Nobody. Maybe if I could find a place in Africa that had no TV. And that was about the only chance. Three months after this had been done, on the very night my licenses actually arrived in the mail, I got a phone call from the head of the pilot unit at Northwest. I had not fought or resisted my firing. I believe they were fair to fire me. He said, this is the greatest phone call I've ever made because you're not going to believe this, but John Dasper, the president and CEO of Northwest Airlines, has personally reinstated you to full-fledged status. I couldn't believe it. I couldn'T believe it, but tears came again, and I didn'T try to stop them. I went back November 1st of 1993, not quite four years from the date of the incident. My rest. Never to be a captain again. I said, that's okay. The gratitude that I have had all this time has been nothing short of overwhelming. All of the shame has been replaced by the gratitude. I didn't care about being a captain. But the miracles I find in this program are limitless and I can never overestimate them. And as I was approaching my final year at Northwest, I received another phone call. And it was the same pilot. He said, John Dasper just notified me. We want you to be a 747 captain for your final year. So I went back and I checked out, restored again to that thing that Indian people refer to as the circle, which means a lot of things to us in different ways. With the circle completed, I sat in the left seat again, completely restored as a Boeing 747 Captain. I retired at the mandatory retirement age of 60 in 1998. and as I was retiring, this judge and consistent with the luck that I'd always had was the toughest criminal judge in the Minnesota Federal District notified my attorney. He said that never once in 16 years have I ever supported a petition for pardon and he'd tell Lyle if he wants to make defense I'll support his. In January of 99 I sent in all the papers I dotted the I's, crossed the T's I didn't make any gifts to the Democratic National Committee I didn't know anybody and two years later I came walking in January of 2001 and there were eight phone messages saying he had just received the presidential pardon I want to close very quickly but I want tell the people that are new here the second day I was in treatment I sat at an outside meeting and I listened to the promises head down and I began to listen to these promises and I became to hope until we got to the part that said no matter how far down the scale we've gone we'll see our experience can benefit others and I said no not for me, maybe for you but not for you, I'm going too far down this will not apply to me and I have gotten to live out one of the most amazing journeys that even I have trouble believing sometimes I don't know what you think about it, but I don' t have a day that goes by that I don''t sometimes wonder, did that really happen to me? All that really happened to me. And it did. This program is nothing short of amazing. I can''t explain it and I don ''t understand it. But I do know this. If you get sober and you stay sober, if you do the next right thing, if you keep coming to events like this, if you work with others, if you deal with people, if you follow the stuff that we're asked to do, There is no limit to the things that can take place in this program. I want to thank you for having me here. Where's that sign, Ann? Okay. Thank you.