Greg Sumner: Airline Pilot

Greg Sumner grew up fascinated by airplanes and managed to parlay that love of aviation into a career as a pilot, flying some of the most iconic aircraft out there for United Airlines. He also served as the co-chair of the National Gay Pilots Association, a worldwide organization dedicated to creating community for LGBTQ+ people across all aviation jobs, and fostering a more inclusive industry. He joined me to share some of his pilot stories, to talk about a 9/11 hero who was a member of the National Gay Pilots Association, and explain why he feels diversity and inclusion aren’t just buzzwords, but a matter of life and death.

Content note: At about 28:40, Greg shares a derogatory term for a gay man that was used to describe him by another pilot.

Transcript after the player.

Link to donate to The Museum of Flight

Link to the National Gay Pilots Association website

0:00:01

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SEAN MOBLEY:       Hello and welcome to The Flight Deck, the podcast of The Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. I’m your host, Sean Mobley. Greg Sumner is typical of so many av geeks I've met over the past few years working here at the museum. He grew up fascinated by airplanes, he's got models of some of his favorite around the house. He managed to parlay that love of aviation into a career as a pilot, flying some of the most iconic aircraft out there for United Airlines. He also served as the co-chair of the National Gay Pilots Association, a worldwide organization dedicated to creating community for LGTBQ+ people across all aviation jobs and fostering a more inclusive industry. In this season of The Flight Deck, we're sharing LGTBQ+ stories. Greg joined me to share of his own stories as a pilot to talk about one of the heroes from 9/11 that was a member of the National Gay Pilots Association and explain why diversity and inclusion aren't just buzz words to him but a matter of life and death. A content note. About 29 minutes into this episode, Greg shares a derogatory term for a gay man that was used to describe him by another pilot. As always, we're leaving the interview uncensored, but I did want to give a heads-up. With that, please welcome Greg to the podcast.

0:02:01

SM:     What is your earliest aviation memory, Greg?

GREG SUMNER:      My grandparents moved to Tucson right before I was born, growing up in Chicago, and my parents would take us to O'Hare Field to catch a flight on American Airlines and also on TWA 727 stretch service non-stop from Chicago O'Hare to Tucson International. And that hooked me pretty quickly. So flying not the friendly skies but flying American and TWA so I always tell the American flight attendants that it's their fault that I am an airline pilot today.

SM:     Did you get to go do the whole tour of the cockpit, the whole nine yards back then?

0:02:42

GS:      Did that and even had a gate agent at DFW one time when I was traveling by myself, I was in high school. I told her I was going to be an airline pilot and she walked me down on the luxury liner DC-10 service from DFW to O'Hare and said, "Take a left. Go have a seat up in first class." So my first first-class experience was in row 1 of the DC-10 luxury liner on American. So yes, I've had some amazing experiences with the airlines.

SM:     You know, it's tougher to do that these days in the post-9/11 world but it's so interesting how still today, so many people get bit by the aviation bug have a very similar story. It just all comes back to somebody introducing them to this whole thing.

GS:      That's why, in fact, on my last trip to London on the 787, we had a family come up to say hello and we love having kids come up and put them in the seats, wear our pilot hats, take photos of the families because I remember how important that was for me to think, hey, I can actually do this.

0:03:58

SM:     So what was your journey then in towards becoming a pilot and what got you here? What have you flown?

GS:      Well, I was really fortunate when I was in eighth grade. One of my neighbors, who I had on my paper route. I was a newspaper delivery boy so one of my neighbors, her best friend happened to be Bill Norwood, one of the founding members of OBAP and the first African American pilot United hired. And so she coordinated my mom and dad to meet Bill and his wife on a Saturday afternoon in Chicagoland and he spent the afternoon kind of mentoring me on what I needed to do. So that started that journey, and growing up near O'Hare, I just did whatever I could to be around the airlines. If that meant going and spending the afternoon listening to the air traffic control frequencies on a radio and learning process, doing that, then getting a job working construction at O'Hare. I was actually a surveyor for the airport all through college. So there are taxiways that didn't exist until I was a surveyor for that. So that's what helped put me through school.

And then I got a merit-based scholarship to go to Western Michigan University so that's how I got to major in aviation. I also double-majored in Spanish, did a foreign studies semester in Spain. While I was in Spain, kind of what I had talked about with the American experience, I talked with the pilots, who I would run into when I would be on trips. Of course, this would all be in Spanish and one time doing that, I get on this brand-new MD-88, flying from Grenada Spain to Barcelona and just before we start taxing out, the flight attendant comes back and says, "Hey, Captain would like to see you." And this was all in Spanish, okay. And I go up to the front and Captain says, "Hey, Gordio," my name in Spanish, and he says, "Do you want to sit up here for the flight?" This was in 1994 and of course, I'm like, "Uh, yeah. That would be amazing." And so I got to fly on a brand new MD-88 on Aviaco Airlines in the jump seat, in the cockpit jump seat to Grenada to Barcelona.

0:06:38

And again, that kind of experience just hooks you, especially when you're in aviation and you're getting to observe all of the things you're learning in aviation safety class and CRM class, in your piloting class. So once I got out of Western Michigan as a CFI, I moved out to Arizona where I knew the weather was good and became a flight instructor. I worked as a baggage handler for United Airlines. I was a gate agent while I was flight instructing so I flew as much as I possibly could, and once I had enough hours to be competitive, I got hired at Continental Express. Went back up to the north tundra of Cleveland and started as a beach 1900 pilot and commuting from O'Hare, living back in my childhood home.

And upgraded there and got hired at the ripe young age of 26 at United Airlines and started as a Boeing 727 flight engineer. I actually got to fly the 727 as a co-pilot before they grounded them with 9/11. I've flown the 737. I've been furloughed twice so I've had a weird airline career. From those furloughs, I got to fly Leer jets. I've flown, let's see, King Airs, C90's, and so I've gotten to touch a lot of the industry and during the second furlough, after flying the Airbus at United, I went to work for L3, which is now L3 Harris in their NextGen department. And we, along with Honeywell and Rockwell, were the companies and Garmin, at the time, we were kind of leading the charge for next gen for ADSBN.

0:08:34

And so they brought me on, the company brought me on here in Pheonix to help do business development and create business cases for why airlines and operators needed to equip early and how we could use ADSBN to help prevent runway incursions, for example. So I did that for five years.

SM:     I'm going to interrupt you. Do you mind explaining what ADSBN is for our listeners who might not know?

GS:      Sure. So ADSBN, Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast N, N meaning what we're taking in of all the information that's being sent out by each individual aircraft or drone. We can take that data and process that information. For example, the wake turbulence. When a plane is taking off and it's heavy, it's producing quite a bit of wingtip vorticities. There are algorithms that can assess the load that that plane in front of you is -- the wing loading that that plane in front of you is experiencing and help predict where, based on the local wind conditions, where those wingtip vorticities might be so you can actually fly around them. So that's just one example of what you can do with ADSBN.

SM:     Cool. So but you did get back in the skies up to now?

GS:      It's amazing. I really -- you know, the industry went through some tumult after 9/11 and the financial crisis that it was bad. I mean, it was really bad. We call it the lost decade, but it was really more like 15 years. So we have a whole generation of people who didn't even consider airline or flying as a career because it just wasn't something that was incentivized to be in. And so 2013, United and Continental, the pilots merged their seniority list, got a new contract, and suddenly, it wasn't 2009 anymore. It was actually something that you could look at and say, "Hey, I can have a retirement out of this."

0:10:54

Because of course, we had lost our pensions. We had lost our stock ownerships. And so many of those things were dealt with, with the consolidation of the airline industry. So I came back to fly the 757, 767 because one of the things that was missing in my work in the avionics industry, I didn't have international experience. So I would be asking the flight technology folks at the airlines, "Hey, how do you do this? How do you fly over the water with the oceanic track system?" I mean, now I do it in my sleep, almost literally. And with that, I just didn't have that grasp of how we could use ADSBN to make it more efficient flying over the ocean so that was kind of a big check-the-box for me to experience that.

And so I flew the 75’, the 76’, then I got to fly the 747-400. I was one of the final pilots of the 747-400 at United when they retired in November of 2017. So I was really lucky to get to do that. And from there, I upgraded to the 737. Flew that right up until the pandemic and then sat for about 14 months wondering what they were going to do with me. And here I am now flying the 787 Dreamliner. I'm a first officer based in Los Angeles getting to fly lots of cool international destinations. This is probably when I get to tell you that my very first flight on the fleet, on the 787 was to Tahiti. So, you know, it kind of brought me right to one of the best spots that we fly.

SM:     Good. So just a side question about the 787, something I've heard. The 787 we have at the museum is number 3 and it was one of the sail planes. Like the round-the-world tour for sails planes and one of the things that I've heard about it is that the wings use algorithms to detect wind coming up to make micro adjustments to. Is it true? Does it work?

0:13:17

GS:      That's exactly right. It is absolutely true. It is really kind of bounces. It's almost like a bouncing. The turbulence gets muffled. I think that's probably the best description. It's very different. I actually just flew on a 747-8 last week and I was sitting over the wing. That's just such a stable airplane but it's a totally different dynamic of how it's stable. I think it's just because of the structure of that aircraft is, whereas now we're using these flight control computers to sort of muffle the turbulence.

SM:     Yeah, I've never flown a 787. I'm just so curious about it.

GS:      The humidity level and the altitude, you're only at about 4,000 feet pressure altitude so it's really comfortable after a 14-hour flight.

SM:     You would know.

GS:      Yes.

SM:     So another side question. So have you ever, then taxied down a runway at O'Hare or taxied down a taxiway at O'Hare that you helped create?

0:14:30

GS:      Oh, absolutely.

SM:     That's so cool.

GS:      Taxiway Echo is -- Victor used to be Delta and that was the -- we called it Rollercoaster Road because the cargo planes used to just rip it up. It was the cargo taxiway way back in the day and now I believe it's Victor. But the whole north side where the holding pad is, they call it "Hangar Alley," that whole area, I actually learned nighttime operations, air operations. I learned nighttime air operations from a car, from our company car almost kind of the same height as you would learn in a small airplane. So picture being in a Piper but learning nighttime operations at O'Hare. The mechanics would come out of the hangar, and they had pretty much free reign when they would bring the planes back to the terminals from all the hangars. So you had to be really diligent when you were driving around at 3 in the morning. A MDA-80 might sneak up on you with the tech ops folks taxing at 50 knots. It was pretty wild. But yeah, I learned nighttime operations, like how to see at an airport, from that construction job, amazingly enough.

SM:     Is it normal for pilots -- because you said you've done work actually out on the ramp, you've been gate agent, you've done baggage. Like, is it normal for pilots to experience all those different levels?

0:16:03

GS:      I think many of my co-workers would say that I've had a very strange career. I would say a lot of have worked the ramp and done other jobs, maybe flight attendant, but just the sort of huge swath of the industry -- especially on the airline side, timing is such a huge thing. So I think just based on my timing and what happened in the industry, especially post-9/11, it's just what happened and I'm so grateful that I got to see all these different aspects of the operation. So when I became a captain at United, I knew the gate agent job. I understood how the ramp interacts with the flight deck. And so then on top of that, I've worked on air side stuff. I understand the operation because I've been on the other side. And so I think it just kind of gives a bigger picture of our aviation system, and it helps me to be a total av geek too.

SM:     Certainly can't hurt on the empathy front; that's for sure.

GS:      Yes.

SM:     So in all this, at what point did you start to understand your identity as a gay person?

GS:      Well, I think -- I knew I was different when I was a little kid. So kind of growing up, I would suppress that part of me and I always talked about that I sort of had two identities. One was my aviation side and then one was my sexual identity, and I think they were never going to come together. I did an internship for United when I was in college at Western Michigan and so I worked in the Miami flight office when United had a hub in Miami. And no one there was ever going to know that I was gay. I never felt like -- let's see, this was in 1996 I did the internship. There was no way I was going to ever tell anyone and share that part of me.

0:18:23

So there was always this sort of two-sided coin for me in aviation where I didn't feel like I could be myself. And that started to change when I got hired at Continental Express and I happened to meet some other gay pilots. And so go to 1998, 1999 when I'm this new person in the airline world, at least flying. I'd been in the airlines. I'd been working on the ramp; I'd been doing these other jobs. But pilots were always on this giant pillar for me. They were larger than life. It was what I always wanted to do and who I wanted to be, but I never felt like I could also be gay at the same time.

And so I just sort of compartmentalized those things. Not very healthy, right, I don't think but that's just how it was, at least back then. So 1999 I get introduced to some people at Continental Express who were in NGPA, the National Gay Pilots Association. And I'd always seen their ads. Oh, gay pilot? You know, call such and such. And they were in the flying magazine, flight training. I know they were banned from some of those at some point. Some organizations decided to stop all advertising to prevent the NGPA from putting ads in. And so it was -- the message was clear. I wasn't welcome if I were a gay person, at least back then. And then all of the sudden, I'm getting -- I feel like I'm combining my social and my identify with my career through NGPA.

0:20:18

And that was the first time I felt whole. I felt like a normal person because I could just be myself and be that av geek at the same time. That was a huge, huge metamorphosis for me and so I'll always have a special place for NGPA in my heart because suddenly I didn't have to hide. I could love aviation and love airplanes and obviously this is a podcast, but you can see airplanes in the background as we're talking. I could look up at airplanes flying over from O'Hare and also be a gay person.

SM:     So let's talk a little bit more then about the NGPA, the National Gay Pilots Association. When you joined, was there still -- you kind of hinted at this but was there a stigma around the organization within the wider aviation community?

GS:      Yeah. I joined it officially, I joined in '99 before I went to United. I started at United in 2000. Yeah, there absolutely was a stigma. I was very particular in who at Continental Express knew but we were also a really young group at Continental Express back then and so it was a different generation. It was my generation. And so it was kind of, as Will and Grace was opening up the world, Ellen DeGeneres Show had kind of opened up the world so I think we were starting to feel more comfortable with each other, but at the same time, oh, I was definitely not out, so to speak, at Co Ex.

I made the decision at United because I had so many friends at United growing up in Chicago, having been a CSR, a customer service rep, having been a ramp person. I made the conscious decision when I started as a pilot at United because I know how painful it was to have had that internship and not allowe the people I worked with in Miami to know my entire self.

0:22:42

I made the decision that I wasn't going to necessarily be out at work, but I also wasn't going to hide. So if someone -- if I had other United pilots who I had a social life outside of O'Hare, for example, I wasn't going to hide who I was. And I have friends who did. They hid who they were even outside, hanging out with other people. So yes, there was definitely a stigma being a member of NGPA back in '99, 2000.

SM:     And while in society, the stigma has decreased, NGPA still has pretty strict rules about how you talk about who's a member even today. Less about stigma and just more about protection of your membership.

GS:      Yeah. We would have events, our flagship events in Provincetown and in Palm Springs and I remember back at the beginning, we would be asked, "Oh, are you okay with your picture being taken?" Things like that. I know now if someone decides they don't want to have that side of them shown, people are very respectful of that decision, but generally speaking, I wouldn't say it's like it was 23 years ago. But I do remember absolutely, if you didn't want people to know, you made sure you were not in a photo.

SM:     That seems to get harder to do just the more easy it is to take pictures. I've been in that situation in the past few years at conferences and stuff where I haven't wanted my picture taken for, you know, previous employers and stuff like that. It sucks.

0:24:34

GS:      It does. Then you're worried about that instead of contributing. This is something we talk about with aviation safety and diversity, equity, inclusion activities is when we -- when someone’s worried about their identity being sort of promoted out there. I've actually had this happen at United where someone outed me. And I'll tell you what. It is really -- you stop thinking about flying safely. You're thinking about everything but and that's completely the opposite of everything we learn when we're learning to fly. We learn to bare it all, put it out there, put it out there and communicate with your crew members, etcetera, etcetera, and that's what's going to have the safest operation. But the moment someone is having to compartmentalize and be -- try to pretend to be somebody else, well, now we call them brain bb's, right, in flight training. You're using brain bb's not for flying but for, you know, trying to hide your identity from someone.

SM:     Are you willing to share more of the context of that story?

GS:      Absolutely. I was a new first officer on the 727.

SM:     About what year was this?

GS:      This was 2001.

SM:     Okay.

GS:      And I remember like it was yesterday because I told you that I had made the decision that if people knew me outside of work and outside of the flight deck, I was not going to hide who I was.

0:26:13

I'd gotten my dream job. This was my dream career job. Even on probation, we do one year of probation typically at the airlines. Even during that time, I made that decision because I felt like, okay, at this point I've gotten to where I've always wanted to achieve. And so I was still on probation and this particular captain, a 727 captain, who shall remain unnamed, he was supposed to do a big Europe trip with some of my new hire classmates and so they knew each other. I didn't know him. He was friends of friends. And I'm in flight operations at O'Hare, which at the time was larger than most airlines in the world. We had that many pilots. It was crazy busy. And he sees me, and he sees one of our mutual friends and I walk out. You know, I'm very friendly because I think I'm going to be hanging out with him Europe in a few months, and I'm friendly anyway so it's just my nature.

So I leave and I find out from this other 727 captain. This is kind of how the conversation goes. He says, "Hey, you know he knows about you, right?" I said, "Knows about me what?" "Oh, he knows that you're gay." And of course, I'd not outed myself to him. This guy was in the hallway ranting about how I was gay and used some not-so-great language. And what he didn't know was that this person who he knew from new hire -- so they had started at United together. What he didn't know was that this person was also gay. So he's telling his supposed friend how horrible it is that I’m a gay pilot. So I find this out. Fast forward a couple months.

0:28:20

And at two in the morning, I get a call from the crew desk, crew schedulers, because I'm on call, I’m on reserve. I get a call that I'm going to have to show up at the airport at 5 a.m., so within three hours, and I'm flying a three-day trip with this captain, with the one who has called me a faggot. And I'm, of course, traumatized at this point. I don't get anymore sleep. I’m done. And I get to the operations at 5 in the morning. Of course, we know each other. That's the other piece of this. It's not like we had never met, but I know that story. And so I let him get into my head. And we get into operations, and he's clearly not thrilled that he has to fly with me. He's on reserve. He's on call as well.

He wouldn't even shake my hand in operations. That's very unusual when you're meeting somebody, especially somebody you know. And so in that moment, I made the absolute decision that I had to fly better than I'd ever flown before. And guess what? And I was a brand-new pilot on this airplane. In fact, the 727 was the very first airplane I ever learned how to fly on autopilot. We didn't have autopilots before that. And so here I am flying this jet with 141 passengers, and I've got to be better than I've ever been because this guy thinks what he thinks about me. And that's what I did. The next three days, I had to fly perfectly, better than perfectly. And by the third day, he was just nothing but friendly, hand on my shoulder, you know, like we were old buddies because I had proved him wrong that I knew how to fly and airplane.

0:30:23

And that story for me, that experience, while I'm a Caucasian male and I don't necessarily wear my gayness on my sleeve. And so that's when I understood just a moment, just a bit of what it must be like for my female pilot friends, for my other minority pilot friends who have to show up to work and be treated like this guy treated me and have to fly better than they've ever flown before. And it doesn't happen often, but I know what that feels like. It's not a positive experience because, again, I'm more worried about how is this person going to take me, rather than me flying a safe jet.

SM:     Thanks for sharing that story, Greg. Shifting gears to today. Part of NGPA's goal is to create a world where that situation doesn't happen in the industry. So how has the organization kind of changed and evolved? I want to go back to the roots of it then.

GS:      Sure.

SM:     What do you know about the earliest days of the NGPA? I mean, this was far before your time.

GS:      Well, I will upset some folks at NGPA because I was in high school when they formed. It was formed in 1990 as a social club and then, of course, became an official entity in 1994. Their first event, actually --

0:31:54

SM:     Question. So while it was a social club, did it go under a different name or anything like that?

GS:      I think it was the GPA, it was the Gay Pilots Association.

SM:     Okay.

GS:      Was the original.

SM:     But it wasn't super hidden? Like here in Seattle, I came learn in conversation with the -- we are not a Boeing museum but we are surrounded by Boeing and I was chatting with some folks at Boeing who were part of LGBT affinity group and they said that back in the day, their group existed as the bonsai tree club.

GS:      Wow. Wow.

SM:     As a way of kind of hiding in plain sight.

GS:      Yeah, it was under the radar. No pun intended but pun intended. It was under the radar by basically creating this event in Provincetown Massachusetts and everybody self-identified with a specific t-shirt. I mean, it wasn't out there for sure. And the articles of incorporation went as a social organization were in 1994. Not long after that, the 501(c)(3) was set up for the education fund.

0:33:11

I don’t, unfortunately, have that exact timeline. But for me, because I'd -- it took a scholarship for me to get to pursue my dream. So for me, besides NGPA being the safe space for me to be my whole self with aviation and socially and meeting people, the scholarship, the education fund side of things is really what pushes NGPA to what it is today. And so I joined in '99 and then I joined the board of the education fund in 2009, so 10 years later. But I saw folks who got scholarships. In fact, our endowed scholarship is named after David Charlebois, who is the first officer of the plane that hit the Pentagon, the American Airlines plane. So we were supposed to get together in Provincetown right after that.

And so the education fund, I think that piece of this is really -- it's the glue because it has destigmatized, if you will, why -- we're aviation people. We love aviation and we want to give people the opportunity to do what we get to do, whether someone goes in through the military or merit scholarship program, we're all trying to get to this aviation mecca, if you will. And that education fund has been a big piece because it was built internally. It was built by our members. There were lots of arguments over the years. When do we start giving out an endowed scholarship? Because members, it was their money. It wasn't money coming from corporations and unknown donors; it was coming from us.

0:35:24

And so I remember when we finally did this named endowment of how contentious and fulfilling it really was. And so we've had some pretty amazing, amazing people get these scholarships and go on into industry, and I think that's been probably a big piece of "Hey, we're here. We're here to stay. We're here to help the industry." And it's okay to put NGPA scholarship recipient on your resume.

SM:     Very different world from 1990 when it was formed.

GS:      Huge. And even my own employer, you know, I've done all these jobs and it's always been seen for a long time as being a fairly progressive airline when it came to LGBTQ rights. And I remember when United showed up at our Palm Springs event, our industry day, and brought all these pilots in their uniforms to do interviews at our industry day. And I was standing at the NGPA booth with one of my 777, United 777 captain friends who I met when I first started in the organization. And the two of us, I think this was -- I want to say this was February of 2015, and we sort of looked at each other and went, "Oh, my gosh. Did we ever, ever expect to see our airline bring flight operations hiring, pilot hiring to our event?" I couldn't even have imagined that 15 years prior to that when I started and when I interviewed.

So huge, huge transition in that time. And, you know, pretty fulfilling to see that the industry said, "Hey, we've got a huge talent pool here, whether it's women in aviation or OBAB or Latino Pilots Association, NGPA. We have a talent pool that we're not addressing and we need to bring them into the mix and make sure everyone feels welcome.”

0:37:51

SM:     Really interesting perspective you shared a little earlier about it also becomes a flight safety question if you're not -- and that's true overall. HR departments. One of the reasons to make a company feel welcoming is so that people feel welcomed and perform well. If I don't perform well, worse that happens is the podcast doesn't go out on time. If you don't perform well, people can die

GS:      Yeah. I mean, I think we -- again, I said that pilots -- I had put them on this pedestal, right, as a younger person. And what I know now is we're just regular people who have a lot of responsibility, we're highly trained specialized people, and at the end of the day -- and we're very mission-oriented. That's the other piece. And so we want to get the mission done safely. And the moment that you -- we talk about this at my company. Hey, are you doing today? Do you have any personal stuff going on? Oh, did you come back from three weeks of vacation? Do you need to take a little bit of extra time because you've been out of the flight deck for a little bit? But then you throw in this, I'm acting like somebody who I'm not. And I've been there. I was there with this particular story I shared earlier.

When you're worried about walking on eggshells that you're going to do something wrong because this person doesn't like you, rather than just showing up and doing the job and following standard operating procedure and showing up being treated with professional respect to begin with. And I think that's the big difference is that some folks don't know -- many folks don't know in our industry what it's like to show up and not be given the benefit of the doubt.

0:39:55

That's a feeling that I, as a gay male, if somebody doesn't like that part of me, it's the primary thing. And you talked about being with Boeing. I actually presented for a Boeing pride event, and I talked about this. That at the end of the day, we as an industry, we're a safety system. And if we're not addressing parts that are going to take away safety, and this is definitely one of them, people not being able to show up to their job as their authentic selves, that's not good in the long run, for sure. It doesn't matter what seat you're in, whether you're an air traffic controller, first officer, or you're the ramp personnel who needs to make sure that the cargo door is closed properly.

SM:     And there's the question, too, of double standards. Someone will be talking about on a different episode of the podcast that comes out after this is a pilot named Karen Ulane and she is a transgender pilot. She flew in the 1980's for Northwest and she was fired after she began undergoing what we today call gender confirmation surgery. She sued and so we have all these court documents that kind of lay the reasons the airline said that it was inappropriate for her to be flying.

GS:      Wow.

SM:     And then all the reasons when she won, the first version, that the judge said, "Well, this doesn't work out." And there's an amazing one that I like to bring up, which is that the airline basically said that her presence would be a distraction to customers. They wouldn’t feel comfortable flying with a person who is transgender because it's just too in your face about an identity.

0:42:02

And the judge, in his findings, pointed out that just a few months prior to firing Karen, a Northwest pilot and his wife, who was a flight attendant, had posed in Playboy Magazine and Northwest had nothing to say about that at all. It was perfectly fine for that to happen.

GS:      Wow.

SM:     But for a person to just show up and fly a plane as a transgender person was --

GS:      As themselves.

SM:     -- not acceptable, yeah.

GS:      Yeah, it's -- yeah, the double standard is amazing, and I try to not be in people's faces about it and just be in education mindset. We should always be in a learning mindset in this industry because things are changing and I really -- one of the things we talked about in strategic planning at NGPA over the years is what does success look like to you? And success to me, for NGPA, is to have all of our efforts to be where NGPA doesn't have to exist. And we talk to some of our brother and sister organizations out there, it's actually pretty similar.

0:43:20

And we've been to events in Europe, for example, at the ebase in Geneva and we've had people come up to us saying, "Why do you even have an organization like this?" Because in their culture, whatever culture this person is coming from, they can't even understand that there'd be an issue, that we would need to have some of that solidarity and commiserating of what it's like to have to lead this double life.

SM:     So what is NGPA doing then? I know you have, for example, a thriving scholarship program to help foster the next generation. You've talked about how mentorship has been a big part of your life. What are you doing first to help bring along the next generation of pilots?

GS:      Well, I'll give some historic background on the scholarship program. There was a time back not too long ago where we couldn't give money away. We challenged ourselves to even try to get 30 applicants to give away this money one year. And now, we're I think going to be about 1/2 million dollars with all of the funds that we've got between our endowment funds and our corporate donors. But I think the scholarship side of this, bringing people together with that fellowship, encouraging students at university aviation programs to come out to our big events so that they can network with folks who are already in the industry. That was something that I had to sort of do on my own when I was in undergrad. And now, I think the universities, the large aviation university programs are doing a really good job of connecting with NGPA and getting their students -- whether they're ally members, whether they are scholarship recipients, it doesn't matter, just bringing people together for that fellowship. Because at the end of the day, we all love aviation and we're all trying to be successful and be safe in the industry.

0:45:36

So I think that's where everything sort of stems from that scholarship program of connecting with the younger generation. And then, we've got our inclusion training team, where we've gone out and helped professional standards groups at different pilots unions. Hey, how do we address what's going on in the flight deck when someone is not being treated as if they're an equal? How do you handle that? How can you create a more welcoming environment? Things like that where we're working with industry to create that safe space. NPGA has held, I want to say it's been four now -- the pandemic, obviously, delayed some things but we've held at least four DEI summits for the aviation industry. And the last one was actually hosted at the airline pilot's association headquarters in Virgina. And United States Airforce recruiting team was there, the FAA was there. You had acting administrator Billy Nolen, he spoke to the folks who were attending the summit.

So we're really engaged with the industry to make sure that aviation is that welcoming space so people can show up to work and be safe from the get-go. We're working on some -- for those folks who are not in university programs, maybe they're coming from just the general aviation world, which is where I started. I started in GA; most of us do. Creating a program with the Mayo Clinic for mental health assistance and making sure that if someone needs help, whether it's some sort of physical side where they need some advice or getting that mental health assistance and trying to break down the stigma of getting mental health assistance. We're working on that. I know the organization is really committed to taking care of its members and again, making the aviation system safer.

0:48:07

SM:     How has the NGPA also been involved in actual legal action or lobbying or anything to that end on behalf of its members?

GS:      Yeah. Obviously, as a 501(c)(3), we're very careful. We can't be political, but we can certainly advocate. I know we've been instrument in how the FAA deals with HIV. Members of our organization were at the forefront to make sure that that was no longer a disqualifying activity or status with getting an FAA medical because at one point it was. And that directly was because of NGPA members and leaders. But advocating for transgender rights, especially for as it applies to being in the flight deck of a commercial airliner, for example.

Standing up when -- we have members who are in the military, and standing up and showing support for our transgender members who are still in the military and making sure that they have opportunities that anyone would have and their transgender status isn't stopping that. So, yes. The advocacy side is definitely a part of NGPA. It's really advocacy, the scholarship side, and education. We've had amazing speakers over the years. We learn from our hangar talk, right? We learn from other pilots and other aviation professionals. One year we had Al Haines, the captain of United Flight 232 that crashed in Sioux City.

0:49:59

I mean, the poster child for a CRM, crew resources management, how to be successful that way. And Al, before he passed away, was kind enough to spend a day with us, with our organization and talk about that Sioux City experience and what he learned from it. So advocacy, scholarship, and education really are three pillars for our organization.

SM:     And you hinted at this a little bit, but your work goes far beyond your name at this point, National Gay Pilots Association. So who is NGPA for at this point?

GS:      Well, NGPA, our tagline being the worldwide LGBTQ organization for aviation. We've got groups all over the world now. In some countries, the national part has a negative moniker, so we've shortened it to NGPA. There has been talk internally about potentially changing the name. I know OBAB has changed what its initials stood for as its membership changed. But yeah, we have members all over the world who really rely on that comradery and again, want to show support for the industry and make it better.

SM:     You've talked about the comradery. Looking back into your own story, how did you, when you were first starting out, how did you kind of find your people? I know you said you weren't out and maybe you didn't know a lot of gay people who were also pilots, but did you? And if so, how did you all find each other?

0:51:53

GS:      I thought I was only one, Sean. It's amazing how many of back then, that's what we thought. I thought I was the only gay pilot in the world. Yeah, it's a very lonely world when you think you're the only one. Kind of going back, I think just hanging around with a bunch of young people in Cleveland, new pilots, new airline pilots, we sort of just found each other. It was like, oh, I'm an adult now, I’m out of the house, we're out of college, and I have a real job. It didn't pay very well but I have a real job. And we just sort of -- it sounds crazy -- sort of found each other. And what's also interesting, is not every gay pilot I knew back then was interested in being in NGPA. They were not interested in going. That wasn't their thing. Some people, it was purely social. For me, it was I just want to feel normal. I just want to feel welcome and be able to be myself and not talk about having a girlfriend.

That part of it, that's what was really important to me, and it became an outlet for me. It became an outlet for me to be able to pay it forward, not only on the mentoring side but again, with the scholarship side. But yeah, we just sort of found each other and thank goodness.

SM:     Your organization is continuing to do that, right? It started out in Provincetown with these meetups and that's still something that happens today?

GS:      Yeah. Every mid-September weekend we're in Ptown. We call it the winter warm-up because of winter being colder in Palm Springs in January, we've actually shifted it to February.

0:53:57

So it's typically Superbowl weekend in Palm Springs, although I think this next year we got pushed back another week. Sisters of the Skies has their event one weekend and so we're going to be a different weekend. But yeah, those meetups are incredibly important. But some of them are pretty big events and so we do have local chapters all over the country, also in the UK. I don't know if we have any local chapters in Australia right now. But the local chapters are another way to connect with fellow NGPA members and just again, get that comradery piece.

SM:     You mentioned earlier David Charlebois. Did you know him personally?

GS:      I did, yeah. We had just met, and I was supposed to hang out with him P-Town with some other friends and unfortunately, 9/11 happened.

SM:     Can you remind people? Some of our listeners weren't even born yet.

GS:      Yeah. David, who our endowment is named after, flew for American Airlines and he was 757 first officer and he was on the flight that was hijacked and then was used as a missile in the Pentagon on 9/11. And, you know, talking about that, it's sobering for me because 9/11 seems like it was yesterday. It changed everything in my world overnight.

0:55:50

Here we were in 2001 not even feeling like we could be out of the closet and be our authentic selves at work, and one of the eight pilots who lost their lives working n 9/11 was one of our members. I mean, that's some pretty -- that's close to home. But it shows we're pilots first, right? We're people first. Whatever our gender identification, sexual orientation, that is secondary to those aspects.

SM:     You do have a lot of models here. I see a poster, there we go, of a 314 Clipper which --

GS:      I have not flown that, Sean.

SM:     I didn't think you were that old. That's kind of my personal unicorn plane. If people ask us, you know, what would you add to the museum? And that's one that comes to my mind personally, just because it's such a -- I mean, it's been so romanticized in that time too. I'll be perfectly honest. It's a very romantic notion of this plane, this big honking plane that was built here in Seattle, right?

GS:      Yes.

SM:     In the red barn. I mean, the water that flows by the museum is the same river where they built those. It's such an icon.

GS:      And I believe they flew them to Shannon, didn't they? I think they flew them to Shannon Ireland some of my first flights when I came back from furlough when I flew the 75', 76' at United were to Shannon.

0:57:42

The first time I flew to Shannon, the captain was actually describing to me that this is where the 314's would fly in, that PanAm would fly them in here and this was the big, big stopping point.

SM:     Yeah, you're right, and I believe they're the only -- there's a museum there. There are no surviving 314's but they have a model that you can go in. I don't know if it's full-scale or not. Yeah, somewhere in Ireland; it might be Shannon. I'm sure I'll get an email from somebody that tells me exactly where it is.

GS:      If you ever get the chance to go to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, the 727-100 that's there in the center of the museum, it's actually named. It's a United airplane. They landed it at Meigs Field, put it on a barge, and brought it down Lake Michigan, down to where they could put it in the museum. And of course, that was the site of the World's Fair in 1893. That plane is named in honor of one my mentors, Bill Norwood. And so it's really cool. The Purdue University folks were the ones who pulled all the hydraulics out and made it all nematic so the gear come down, the flaps and slats come down. There’s a great exhibit for Bill and there is his name on the side of the nose of the jet. So that, to me, just brings me joy because I fly for United, my first jet was the 727, and if it weren't for Bill, I might not be where I am today flying the Dreamliner.

0:59:28

SM:     We started with Bill and we've come back around to Bill. I feel like that's a great spot to wrap up. Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you want to make sure we talk about?

GS:      I'm excited for the future of our NGPA members. I think that we have a lot of Zellenials and Gen-Z'ers who have sort of taken the torch. Folks who are recipients of our scholarships and really pushing forward to create that better, safer aviation system and pushing that it's okay to be who you are and we're here regardless. So we're going to fly with you and we're going to fly your families safely, and we're going to continue to make sure that we're giving scholarships out to people who want to be successful in this industry and make sure we've got a pipeline.

SM:     And if people want to learn more about your work, where can they go?

GS:      NGPA.org. That will list any of the scholarship opportunities that are out there, along with our events and ways to get involved.

SM:     Is there an age maximum on your scholarship opportunities? Do you have to be high schooler or can --

GS:      There are various requirements. We have so many different scholarships, from private pilot to tech ops scholarships, so each one has its own requirements but there's plenty of opportunity for everyone.

SM:     Great. Well, Greg Sumner, Thank you so much for joining me today.

1:01:14

GS:      Absolutely, Sean. Thanks for having me.

SM:     Thank you for tuning into this episode of The Flight Deck, the podcast of The Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. The podcast is only possible thanks to our donors. You and your support make this show happen so thank you. You can learn more about the National Gay Pilots Association, including info about their scholarship on their website and I'll leave links to that in our show notes at MuseumofFlight.org/podcast. This season of the podcast, we're leaving space for our listeners to share their own story. If something you heard today sparked a thought in you or if something in Greg's story resonated with you in some way, or if you're an LGBTQ+ person in aerospace who just wants to share an experience, you can contact us at podcast@museumofflight.org. If we get enough submissions, at the end of this run of episodes, we'll share some of your stories, of course, with your permission.

If you like what you heard today, please make sure to subscribe and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you downloaded us from. This episode was produced by Kevin Wright. Until next time, this is your host, Sean Mobley, saying to everyone out there on that good Earth, see you out there, folks.

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