The Central Campus Aviation Technology Academy is headquartered at a remote location, clear out on County Line Road where there’s room for a hangar and the district’s fleet, that’s right, of aircraft. Tuesday the facilities were smack at the intersection of Art & Science as the site for a visit from a distinguished aviator.
Beverley Bass became the first woman captain for American Airlines when she was promoted to that rank in 1986. Now her story plays a leading role in a hit Broadway musical about a measure of triumph over a tragedy that happened on the darkest day of her career.
Come From Away is in town this week for a run at the Des Moines Civic Center. It’s the moving story about Gander, a small town in Newfoundland, that became a hostel of hospitality in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.
Planes from all over the world rerouted to Gander, including one flown by Captain Bass. Hers was the 36th of 38 diverted there when US airspace was shut down in the uncertain hours that followed the hijackings.
She and her crew and their passengers were en route from Paris to Dallas when they were grounded along with 16,000 other people, including 100+ other pilots, in a town that should have been overwhelmed by an emergency on that scale. Instead, it was the town that overwhelmed the throng of uninvited but not unwelcome guests who fate thrust upon it.
Come From Away juxtaposes the kindness, compassion and humanity that poured forth from the Canadian hosts with their antithesis, the hate that motivated the 9/11 terrorists.
Only by happenstance did a Captain Bass character get cast in the show.
“Lots of us returned when we were invited back to Gander on the 10th anniversary of 9/11,” she explained, “but I was the only pilot. That’s when we met the creators of Come From Away.”
By the time the show went into production, it included a song sung by the Bass character, Me and the Sky. It’s about a girl who grew up with a dream to fly. According to Bass, it might have come true sooner if there’d been a program like the CC Aviation Academy available to her.
“Oh my, I am so impressed by what you have here,” she said when she arrived at one of only a handful of high school aviation programs in the country, escorted by Des Moines Performing Arts personnel. “What great exposure to the aviation industry this is for high school students. My family was in the horse business.” It took some convincing on her part before Bass’s parents accepted her determination to get around on two wings instead of four legs.
Captain Bass, now retired, does promotional work in support of a show she’s now seen in excess of a hundred times. She’s petite, or better yet, birdlike. But her favorite plane to pilot, a 777, weighs 150 tons.
“The triple seven is a pilot’s dream,” she said when a student asked which was best among all the planes she’s flown.
That’s a far cry, or flight, from the little Bonanza that was just barely big enough for her and one passenger, a corpse she delivered for a mortician, on the first paying pilot gig, @ $5/hr., that got her aviation career off the ground.
When one of the students slyly asked which she liked better, mechanics (like he and his classmates) or pilots (like Bass and her colleagues), she knew the right (and correct) answer. “They’re both important,” she said. “They depend on one another.”
Sort of like actors and backstage crew.
Captain Bass’s appearance would surely have rated an honorary set of wings from this nontheatrical audience, but since she already has official ones she earned in the wild blue yonder, she was awarded a Central Campus t-shirt and coffee mug instead.
