Small-World Connections

By Matthew Nelson

Until a week or so before I took a commercial flight to Boise from Houston, where I was working on the space program, I had no idea that what I did had any connection with anyone at a McCall company that teaches mountain flying. It was July 2004 and I went up to McCall to fly through Hells Canyon in a plane owned by McCall Mountain/Canyon Flying Seminars.

“Aviation safety is what I promote and represent,” owner Lori MacNichol-Gregory had told me in an email. Although there are thousands of pilots who have learned to fly in mountains and through canyons without the benefit of such professional instruction, I knew that because of my inexperience at such challenges the course might help to keep me alive.

When I first called to see about flying with this company, I had a conversation with an answering machine. A little while later, my phone rang at work. It was a woman named Paige Walker, who said, “You’re at the Johnson Space Center.”

That caught me by surprise. Paige explained she had recognized the first three digits of my office phone number, because she used to work there. She knew some of the same people I worked with, and her late husband, Dave Walker, had been an astronaut.