RSL Ch 1

The early morning fog hasn’t cleared yet. The bus to Incheon Airport arrived at the stop about five minutes later than the scheduled time. The driver greeted me as I stepped onto the bus.

“Hello.”

It’s never too early to say good morning.

“Hello.”

I did the same back.

It was fairly early, but it was the holiday season and the seats were full of people heading to the airport. I was forced to take the only available seat next to her because she had given up her seat to a flight attendant who was waiting for the bus with her at the stop.

Dressed in the same company uniform, she pulled out a printed flight schedule and diagram. I didn’t mean to look, but due to an occupational disease, I unintentionally read her flight.

(cr721-a350 (icn – sin))

She was one of the crew flying with me to Singapore today. There are hundreds of flight crews within the company. It’s very rare that you get to fly with a coworker you don’t recognize, even if it’s from the same company. Plus, it was my first day on the job, so I didn’t know anyone.

She glanced at me to see if I’d noticed her glance, and then checked the name on my cabin bag, but my strange foreign name seemed to deter her from saying hello.

Before I knew it, the bus was speeding down the airport highway. As it turns out, I have a history with Incheon International Airport. I was born the year it was built, and I was abandoned soon after. It was also where I boarded an airplane for the first time in my life, holding my adoptive parents’ hands on the day I was adopted to Germany at the age of eight.

I still remember the pilot’s uniform as he pinched my frozen cheeks and showed me around the cockpit. He spoke to me nonstop in a language I couldn’t understand, and I had two resolutions.

I need to learn German fast, and I need to be a pilot.

That was 22 years ago.

While I was lost in my thoughts, the bus continued down the highway. Before I knew it, the sun was fully up and it was morning.

“You usually fly on a B737, right?”

I decided to talk to the flight attendant sitting next to me who was diligently practicing her announcement.

“What?”

She looked at me, puzzled by the sudden question.

“I heard that Singapore has been flying B737s until now.”

“Oh… yes… I’ve never been on an Airbus before either.”

I wanted to say something more intimate, but I couldn’t think of a topic. Her hair was neatly coiffed and she kept looking at me through her long eyelashes. I could see the embarrassment on her face as she continued to stare at me. Admittedly, I was a bit of a tongue-twisted.

“It’s my first day on the job.”

“Oh…”

She seemed to check my tag once again.

[Maximilian Schmitz]

I had a Korean name, but my adoptive parents gave me a new German name to avoid discrimination. Their first son was named Christian, but fortunately, they were cultured people who didn’t make much of a distinction between their biological and adopted sons.

In fact, when I came to Korea, I was worried about how to introduce myself. It would have been easier to use my Korean name, but it didn’t exist legally. I was hesitant because I felt that having a name like that, even though I’m not of mixed race, represented the complexity of my birth.

But it was surprisingly not bad. It was kind of funny to see the reactions of people who couldn’t ask and wondered about their private lives.

In the meantime, the bus arrived at Incheon Airport Terminal 2.

“I’ll see you at the showup, then.”

I got up from my seat first and got off the bus. As I was about to enter the terminal, I saw a female passenger struggling through the crowd of people removing luggage from the bus’s cargo area. I bent down for her and pulled out a large trunk of luggage that had been pushed all the way to the back. It was heavier than I expected, so I put it on a sidewalk block.

“Uh, thank you, uh, ah…… Thank you very much!”

It was cute to see her stammering her gratitude because of nervousness. I nodded and walked into the terminal. It wasn’t hard to find the company’s flight operations office thanks to the route I had memorized.

“Hello.”

“Hello.”

“Good morning.”

There were about thirty pilots and technical crews milling about. Unable to adjust to the hustle and bustle, I grabbed an employee walking by and asked a question.

“A350, scheduled to Singapore, I’m the PIC (Pilot In Command, the pilot in charge of flying the aircraft). I’m looking for someone to fly with me today.”

“Oh, there he is. Co-pilot! Co-pilot Jeon Sung-wook! Here’s the captain.”

He called the man’s name in a friendly manner, as if they knew each other. At the call, a man in his thirties who had been reading a flight check in the corner saw me and came over, checking the three rows of epaulets on my uniform.

“Huh?! I thought today’s PIC was foreigner?”

“Hello. My name is Schmidt. I’m Korean.”

“Ah, yes… hello. Your name is… if you’re in Germany, did you transfer from LH?”

“Yes. This is my first flight today. Please take care of me.”

I held out my hand. He shook my hand, though he seemed to have a number of complicated hypotheses running through his head. He handed me the papers he was reading. Even though it was my first flight, I felt reassured by his attitude of coming and preparing in advance.

Another ten minutes or so passed and we stood up at the same time.

“Let’s have a full briefing.”

“Yes.”

I followed his familiar steps out of the flight attendant’s office. I walked down the corridor and into a large briefing room. Among the grouped cabin crew, I spotted the crew member who had sat next to me on the bus. She recognized me, too, and smiled and said hello. I greeted her with a nod.

“Good morning. My name is Schmitz, I’m in charge of the Singapore schedule this morning. Mr. Co-pilot, would you please give us the flight briefing first?”

“Yes. Hello, we have an ICN departure scheduled for 09.15. Please give me a 10 minute deadline…”

As I listened to the briefing in Korean, I suddenly felt like my reality was being metaphysically twisted. A month ago, I couldn’t imagine living in Korea. You’re here, Woo Seo-jin. It was the most impulsive decision of my life. Once I realized it was real, I started to get a little nervous.

I’ve been flying airplanes for 10 years, counting my Ausbildung(vocational training). I’ve never been the type of person to get too worked up about things, so a job that requires quick thinking and judgment seemed like a natural fit.

The same was true for emotionally draining work. I never really liked or disliked anyone. Because of the way I was born, from a young age, there were times when someone would talk about me behind my back or give me a pass, but I tended to let it go. I was happy when I was adopted, but I didn’t make a big deal about it.

While I was thinking about that, the Co-pilot’s briefing ended.

“Thank you. Next up, the cabin crew chief, please give us the passenger report.”

“Yes, good morning. One hundred and seventy-three total passengers today, ten cabin crew. That’s a total of 183 people. Full. In business class…”

I remembered my first major emotional breakdown when I was teased at Grundschule (an elementary school in Germany) for being a smelly Asian. I thought I could handle it, but it wasn’t until I overheard my adoptive parents on the phone that I became depressed.

‘Yeah, I know…, but I didn’t think it would smell that bad.’

The word hypocrisy struck me then: to these sophisticated people, the orphan boy they brought from Korea was nothing more than a self-gratifying pity party. It was like taking in a stray dog.

Still, I was grateful to my adoptive parents. I was grateful that they sent me to a public school that was just as good as their biological son’s, and I was grateful that I met Han Jae-yi, who had immigrated to Germany with his parents. An only child who was loved and raised by his parents, both of whom were university professors, he had the physique and looks of his German classmates, making him the favorite of everyone. “Everyone” included me, of course.

Before I knew it, the cabin crew chief’s briefing was over. Next it was my turn.

“Thank you. There’s very little wind today, so takeoff should be fine. We may have a squall at our destination, so please be prepared. I’ll be PF (Pilot Flying) and the Co-pilot will be PM (Pilot Monitoring). If there’s nothing else unusual, let’s go to standby.”

It was my first briefing in Korean, so I didn’t know what to say. The weather was clear, there were no precautions, and although it was my first flight, it wasn’t my first time at Incheon Airport, so it wasn’t anything special.

We trudged out of the briefing room and made our way to the gate. I could hear the clatter of the heels of the eight people following behind me.

“Have you been flying Airbus planes all your life?”

The Co-pilot, who was walking in stride, spoke up.

“Yeah. The first initial was the A380, you know.”

“Yeah, but you were quick to change planes.”

I was lucky enough to be assigned to my first plane, an Airbus jumbo-class luxury airplane. However, it was so expensive to operate and unprofitable that airlines stopped ordering them and they were scheduled to be discontinued. The fate of a pilot with a license in an aircraft that will be discontinued is obvious. I hurriedly obtained a new license for an A350 in a lower class.

It was probably the happiest time in my life: I had moved out of my adoptive parent’s house, paid off all the money I had borrowed with the company’s guarantee, had a steady salary, and was accumulating money. Most of all, I hadn’t really recognized my feelings for Han Jae-yi, which I thought were somewhere between admiration and friendship. It was a comfortable and enjoyable life.

We could be described as ‘good friends’ and ‘friends for life’. When I wasn’t flying, I always met Han Jae-yi. I didn’t have any friends, but I was more comfortable and enjoyable with him than with anyone else. I can say that I was pretty much morally perfect in my greed-free days.

And now. I hadn’t adjusted to reality as well as someone who had committed a crime and gone into exile. I had too many sins to blame Han Jae-yi for, sins I couldn’t even name.

The sin of loving a friend.

This was the reason I fled to South Korea.

“Hello.”

“Thank you.”

After greeting the ground crew, I boarded the aircraft and went straight into the cockpit to go through the checklist with the Co-pilot, while the mechanics finished their checks. I gave the director the boarding sign and started loading the passengers.

“Mr. Co-pilot, have you done many A350 landings?”

He nodded at my comment. But he said the total flight time for the same airplane was now only about 800 hours.

“Do you want to PF when entering Incheon?”

“Oh, really?”

I offered to make up the time for him when he didn’t have enough flight hours to get promoted to captain. I had abandoned all career aspirations by moving to this company in Korea. I wanted to live a quiet life, logging the minimum number of hours to maintain my captain’s license.

The life I wanted to have was shattered after that day.

‘I’m getting married.’

Since Han Jae-yi joined a large law firm, we don’t see each other as often, so I don’t even know that he recently got a girlfriend, until he announces that he’s getting married.

I didn’t know what to say, and I was shocked. It had never occurred to me until then that Han Jae-yi would spend his life with someone other than me. Had I leaned too heavily on the name of best friend?

I got very little sleep that night. As a result, I was in terrible shape for my flight the next day.

We turned on the engines and started taxiing. Luckily, we had a Co-pilot who had the geography of Incheon Airport down pat, so I followed his lead for a while.

• Coreana 721 heavy, wind 320 at 15 knots. Runway 33 cleared for takeoff. (Said in english)

We were a species that practiced something called marriage, and I lived under the illusion that just because I wasn’t interested, they weren’t interested. When humans get older, they meet someone and get married. But it never occurred to me that he would want to do that, too.

‘What good are lovers, friends last forever.’

I thought we had a special relationship, and I believed that these kinds of feelings must exist in the world. But it wasn’t real.

‘Maxie, are you gay?’

Or being called gay by the people around you,

‘Oh, this is my friend Woo Seo-jin.’

Just a friend.

He had to choose one or the other.

Years of believing that things could be different between him and me were shattered by the word “marriage.” I realized then that I had been crushing on Han Jae-yi for 15 years and he had been treating me as a friend for 15 years. It was catastrophic.

• Cleared for takeoff runway 33, Coreana 721 heavy. (Said in english)

Lower the flaps. The airplane’s wheels skid. We sped up to 130 knots. The familiar sound of the wind and fuselage engines drowned out my thoughts of Han Jae-yi.

The airplane took off.