“I forgot all about my troubles and fell in love.”
vJeremy Hoeck
Every time Ryan Marcotte walks
through an airport, through the
jetway and steps into the cockpit, he
remembers — usually, with a smile —
his first flying experience.
He was 10 years old.
And thrust into a situation where
most first-time airplane passengers
would feel nervous and uneasy,
Marcotte was instead calm and
comfortable.
Flying wasn’t the part of that trip
that concerned him, though, as he
recalls.
No, Marcotte — now a 51-year-old
commercial airplane pilot, with family
ties to Yankton — was leaving his
relatives and the only life he’d known
in his native Minnesota and moving to
St. Louis.
“And I wasn’t tremendously happy about it,” Marcotte said, during a
phone interview from California.
Marcotte’s parents had separated and he was moving to Missouri,
but to get there, he was sent out on an Ozark Airlines flight as an
unaccompanied minor.
“I felt like I was leaving everything I loved,” he said. “It was a pretty
sad and upsetting moment for me to be thrown on an airplane by
myself.”
Yes, Marcotte had never flown before, but was feeling more heartbroken and worried about a “scary new place.”
All of those concerns soon subsided, however.
“When I got on the airplane, I forgot all about my troubles and fell
in love,” he said.
By the time Marcotte arrived in St. Louis; just a few short hours
after leaving behind his comfort zone, he realized what he wanted to
do with his life: He wanted to become a pilot.
“From that point forward, that’s when I knew for sure,” he said.
In short order, Marcotte began pursuing that dream.
He earned his first private pilot license at age 17 (or maybe 18, he
can’t quite remember), and by the age of 19, Marcotte had earned all
of his ratings to become a flight instructor — a role he held through
8vHISVOICEvNOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018
college.
After college, in addition to his
duties as a flight instructor he served
as a part time charter pilot. He worked
for several companies and would fly
corporate jets around the country —
an experience he recalls fondly.
It was at age 29 that Marcotte
transitioned out of piloting corporate
jets and into the airline world. It was
a relatively young age to become a
commercial pilot, he said.
Now living in Arizona, Marcotte
works as a pilot for American
Airlines — “a real fortunate and lucky
position,” he said — and flies a Boeing
787 Dreamliner on the company’s
Asian routes, as well as flights to New
Zealand, Australia and Argentina.
Marcotte flies three flights per
month, all out of Los Angeles,
California. He said he usually knows his flight schedule a month ahead
of time.
“If I want to get aggressive, I can squeeze in a fourth trip,” he joked.
The flights over the Pacific Ocean last anywhere between 13-15 hours,
according to Marcotte. On those long trips, airlines use four-person
crews and the crews work in shifts.
“We’ll divide up the flight so each crew gets equal breaks,” he said.
And those breaks are vital, he added.
When he’s not in the cockpit, Marcotte can either rest in the small
bedroom, or sit back in a first-class seat to read, watch a movie or relax.
The overseas flights can often take planes literally over the top of
the world. A trans-Pacific route from Los Angeles west to China, for
instance, might take a jet far north over Alaska and eastern Russia.
The method used is called a great circle route, Marcotte said.
“(This is) the shortest course between two points on the surface of
a sphere. It lies in a plane that intersects the sphere’s center and was
known by mathematicians before the time of Columbus,” he said.
“Until the 19th century, ships generally sailed along rhumb lines,
which made use of prevailing winds and fixed compass headings.
The development of steamships in the 19th century allowed complete
independence from the winds, removing the major uncertainty for
sailors trying to follow a geometrically prescribed route.”