I don’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be an airline pilot. So when I graduated from the University of Colorado in 1990 with a Bachelor of Arts in English and history and told my parents I wasn’t interested in going to law school as they’d hoped I would but rather that I wanted to go to flight school, they weren’t too pleased, but they also weren’t terribly surprised.

Three years later, after working as a flight instructor and freight pilot flying to Mexico and Central America, I had achieved my dream. I was hired as a first officer for the Delta regional airline Atlantic Southeast Airlines (ASA) in Atlanta. Since ASA was growing very rapidly at the time, the pathway to advancement was clear before me — upgrade to Captain in six to eight months, fly a few more years with ASA, then move on to a mainline carrier such as Delta or United. There was only one problem: the airline work environment.