“There’s nothing worse than service jobs,” says the FedEx pilot sitting next to me.

“My daughter—she’s 20 and finishing college—she got a part-time job at Victoria’s Secrets. After working there a day, she told me how terrible people are, how many people don’t have credit and can’t pay for what they want to buy. How rude those people and most of the other customers are. It’s dirty business, she told me.

“And you think I haven’t been telling her this all along? There’s nothing I like better than flying, and flying without passengers, without having to listen to their complaints and care about how they feel the cabin is too hot or too cold or too bumpy or too bright—I would never go back to commercial airliners. Not in a million years.”