Remembering Mom: The Fickle Finger of Fate

Looking back at my mother's life, it's amazing how fickle Fate can be.

I don't write often about my mom; sometimes I feel as if my heart will break if I even think about her too much. But she was the only parent I really had; my father died in a plane crash not too long before my second birthday, so Mom raised me pretty much on her own. But if I don't write about her and share my memories, she'll probably live on only in the memories of a few people.

Mom was an amazingly resilient and adventurous person. After her first marriage failed and she got an annulment from the Catholic Church (there was no divorce in Colombia in the early 1950s), she decided that moving back in with my grandparents and raising my older half-sister as a spinster widow was not for her. Defying convention and my grandparents' wishes, she got a job as a flight attendant in Colombia's flag airline, Avianca.

It was not easy for her. My granduncle Bernardo (my grandmother's brother) was on the airline's board of directors and had some say-so regarding the company's operations. He could not get the airline to refuse to hire her, but he made it known that my mother was not to receive any preferential treatment due to her family connections. I don't know if Mom was hazed or not, but she did tell me a few times that during the first week of training her feet bled as a result of wearing confining stewardess uniform shoes for long periods of time.

Mom was tough, though, and she refused to quit the training program. She was bilingual, pretty, and above all else, intelligent and charming. She won over her trainers, and eventually "Tio Bernardo" simply had to shrug his shoulders and tell my grandparents, "Beatriz is now an Avianca crew member; we have to accept that."

Because Mom spoke good English, she was assigned to fly on international flights. She flew on several routes, but mainly they were the Bogota-New York or the Bogota-New York-Europe routes. (She was also based in Madrid for a time, if I recall correctly.)

Anyway....yeah. The fickle finger of Fate thing. When Mom was based in Europe, sometime in late July of 1954, she got into an argument with an Avianca pilot. They were assigned to fly the transatlantic route from Europe to the Americas. But neither the captain nor my mom liked each other, and they made sure that management knew it.

In August of '54, at an airport in Spain, the Avianca crew pickup vehicle went on its preflight rounds to gather the crews of two flights. One was bound for Lajes in the Azores, then Bermuda; the other one was bound for...I don't remember, but it wasn't Lajes. The van picked up both crews and then drove them to the airport. My mom and the pilot she was having issues with were on the roster for the Lajes-Bermuda-bound flight; my Mom's best friend, Carmen Silva, was assigned to the other flight.

Well, at the Avianca crew area in the airport, the guy who was in charge of crew assignments (dispatcher, I think his job title was) saw that he had a huge problem on his hands. Mom told him that she wasn't flying with "that man," while the obnoxious captain said that he didn't want to fly with my mother on his crew.

Since both flights were due out of the gate shortly, the dispatcher had no choice but to ask if any of the other flight attendants wanted to switch places with Mom. Only one, my mom's best friend Carmen, volunteered. And at that moment, everyone was happy, especially the Avianca dispatcher, because there would be no delays due to a change in the crew.

Then, this happened:

On 9 August 1954, a Avianca Lockheed Constellation crashed three minutes after taking off from Lajes Field, Azores. It was bound for Bermuda. The pilot erroneously flew the Connie left into the hills instead of right towards the sea, killing all 30 on board.

Read an incident report from the Air Safety Network here.