Cleared for Takeoff, Together

A mother, her children, and a lifetime in the cockpit

Over the years, United Airlines pilot Florence “Flori” Fitzgerald has, at times, been inclined to take her career for granted.

“There are some people in my sphere, pilots in my sphere, that just have a huge passion for it,” she says. “And then there’s the rest of us, who were just exposed to it.”

That exposure resulted from growing up the daughter of Gerhart Blain, who caught the flying bug in the 1950s and went on to found Billings Flying Service. Gerhart also passed on his love of flying to Flori and her three older brothers, all of whom made careers of flying. Now, at 55, Flori realizes how fortunate she’s been.

“As I've gotten older, especially now at this stage of my life, I really find I have a lot more nostalgia and love for flying than I did when I was younger,” she says. “I can't imagine where life would have taken me if I hadn't flown airplanes.”

In a literal sense, her career has taken her all over the world. People often ask her what her favorite foreign destinations are. “And I’m like, gosh, I don’t really go on vacation, but I’ve been to New Delhi hundreds of times.” She also flies regularly to Sydney, Australia, and her job has taken her to Buenos Aries, Cape Town, Mumbai and Auckland. (For less frequent fliers, those cities are in Argentina, South Africa, India and New Zealand.)

At the Blain family property off Blue Creek Road on the south bank of the Yellowstone River, flying was something virtually everyone did. Flori remembers that her first flight was in a Piper Super Cub, and she recalls being flown by her brother, Gary, down to see her grandparents in Joliet on Sundays.

Once, when Flori was 8, Gerhart took the whole family to Alaska in a float plane, which meant he had to retract the wheels and let down the floats for landing on water, or vice versa for landing on the ground.

“He told me, ‘Fifty bucks if you ever catch me landing on water with the gear down, or on land with the gear up.’ I was plastered to the window, just hoping he was getting it wrong. Oh, my God, I was just hoping he’d get it wrong. He couldn’t have had a better gear warning horn than me.”

She’s still a little embarrassed by that, as she is when she talks about taking her first solo flight, when she was a week shy of her 10th birthday. In today’s world, she says, such a thing would be considered highly irresponsible, “but I kind of think it’s great. It was a great childhood. It’s kind of a bygone era.”

By the time Flori was in middle school, she knew she wanted to be an airline pilot. After high school, she attended Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona, but only for a year. Back in Billings the summer after her freshman year, she landed a job with Big Sky Airlines and never looked back.

“I don’t like to brag about that because it’s not a good thing, but I never finished my bachelor’s degree,” she says.

Like mother like daughter. Flori’s youngest child, 20-year-old Marin, put in one year at Montana State University, then finished her commercial and multi-engine check ride over the summer. The day after the multi-engine check ride she applied for a job with Mokulele Airlines. She got the job and will be living with her sister, 25-year-old Blayne, in Honolulu, where Blayne flies for Kalitta Air, a cargo airline. Marin does plan to continue working toward a bachelor’s degree, though.

A few years after starting her flight career, Flori signed on with Rocky Mountain Airlines, where she met her first husband, fellow pilot Dan Meyer, who came to aviation via a stint in the Army as a helicopter pilot. Rocky Mountain was a feeder for Continental Airlines, for which they both ended up working.

When Flori was pregnant with her first child, Daniel, and Continental was in financial difficulties, she took a five-year leave of absence. Her second son, Dillon, was born just 15 months later. The family moved to Dallas, where husband Dan was based.

“We were living the total suburban life,” Flori says. “I was home with the kids, and he was flying. I got a little stir crazy there.”

Four years into her leave of absence, Flori went back to work for Continental Airlines. With she and Dan both working, and with, eventually, four kids at home, their schedules were anything but “normal.” Because pilots are allowed considerable leeway in bidding on or dropping certain flights, Flori and Dan, who both eventually were working for United Airlines and American Airlines, respectively, juggled assignments so that one of them was almost always at home. Home then was Montana, to which they’d returned in 2003.

“It was like one career between the two of us,” Flori says. “Neither of us were working a full schedule. It was the only way we could really pull that off.”

It helped, she says, that “Dan was an exceptionally good mom as well as dad, if I could say that. And if you don’t have that kind of support, I wouldn’t recommend it. … We could have made a lot more money. We didn’t do that. It was like, ‘Are you going to have a life? Are you going to see your family or are you going to go fly?’ It was a choice you had to make, and I think for the most part we always made the right choice.”

Dan died after suffering a stroke in 2019, after which Flori took almost a year off work. But she’s been flying ever since, and here she is at 55 with three of her kids well into their airline careers and one of them on the verge. Besides rendezvousing with her children in various locales, she’s also managed to do some tandem flying with her sons.

With Dillon, who also flies for United, she’s flown to London, New Zealand and Honolulu. On one flight back from Honolulu, she and Dillon were pilot and co-pilot and Daniel, a Delta pilot, was in the jump seat, hitching a ride home.

“It’s pretty entertaining, especially talking to other pilots who find the fact that our parents convinced all four of us to do it is a miracle,” Daniel says. “And it’s pretty fun telling the story of sitting on my mom’s jump seat while her and my brother are flying the plane.”

The long flight to New Zealand with Dillon was their first flight together, and it was amazing.

“It was the highlight of my career,” Flori says. “If I was going to talk about highlights in my life, that would be in the top five. What a great treat it was.”

Dillon had put in a request to be his mom’s co-pilot, he says, “and to my delight, I was assigned to fly with her. There’s nothing quite like cruising across the Pacific Ocean with your mom in the other seat — just to make sure she doesn’t get lost.”

In 2023, Flori married Bill Fitzgerald, who is not a pilot and is still adjusting to his wife’s unusual schedules.

“There’s been, you know, a learning curve for both of us,” Flori says. “But we’re just feeling pretty blessed to find each other at this stage in life. Both of us had life-altering things happen in our life, and then you kind of land on your feet and you go, ‘Wow, I didn’t expect that.’”

Flori has been based in San Francisco for years, so any assignment starts with a flight to the Bay Area. Before a trip, say, to New Zealand, flying a Boeing 777, the biggest passenger jet out there, she’ll arrive in San Francisco in the afternoon, nap for a few hours, then fly out at night.

On those longer flights, there are always four pilots, so each pair of pilots flies for six or seven hours, with those ending their shifts usually hopping into a bunk for some more sleep. Once in New Zealand, she generally stays 24 hours before flying home. She prioritizes sleep and exercise. Her usual routine is to walk seven miles or so as soon as she arrives, get a good night’s sleep and then walk seven more miles in the morning.

“The exercise is important, because obviously in an airplane you do a lot of sitting,” she says. Flying those big planes long distances is desirable because, in Flori’s words, “you’re knocking out 30 hours of flying in four or five days,” after which you get six or seven days off in a row.

These days, in addition to sometimes flying with family members on the job, Flori is doing more recreational flying in her Cessna-182, which she describes as a “safe, practical plane that seats four people.” She and daughter Marin flew with a friend of Marin’s to the Bahamas, and even stopped in Florida to pick up Flori’s husband Bill, who didn’t want to be in the back of a small airplane for the whole flight.

“I’m gaining a huge appreciation for it at this stage of life,” Flori says. “I go out in my 182 and I’m just like, this is so wonderful flying over the Beartooths. How did I not know how lucky I was? How did I not know that?”

She supposes she was lucky, too, to have made a career in an industry long dominated by men. When she started, she says, about 1 percent of airline pilots were women, a number that has since risen to about 6 percent.

Marin wishes it weren’t considered a big deal to be a female pilot. If anything, she says, she’d like to see more women involved in airplane maintenance, which is still quite unusual.

“But when they talk of the old days,” Marin says, “it’s kind of cool knowing your mom was one of these young pilots back when it was really just a rare thing.”