Back in the late 1970s I was flying charters out of Eugene, Oregon, and I carried a pager. My girlfriend (now my wife) and I were at a movie on a Friday night when the pager went off. I exited the movie, found a phone, called the answering service, and then the number they gave me, which turned out to be the Village Green, a resort hotel in Cottage Grove, a small community about 30 miles south of Eugene. The party I reached wanted to charter an aircraft to get them down to Novato, a town north of San Francisco that had a small airport, and they needed to get there before the night was out. I agreed to do it on condition that I would bring my girlfriend, to which the client replied that that was no problem, that he was with his girlfriend as well. The Cottage Grove airport was just across the highway from the Village Green, and we agreed that I would pick them up there in the airplane, a Cessna 210.

After a pleasant flight, good conversation in the airplane, we landed in Novato around midnight. We noticed that our two passengers left in separate cars. We didn’t have enough fuel to get back to Eugene, and there was no fuel available at that time of the night at Novato. However, I knew that Sacramento Executive airport had 24-hour fuel, and we had plenty to get there. While the airplane was being refueled, we went into the still-open restaurant lounge and had drinks—coke for me—and a sandwich.

Thus it was that around two in the morning that we found ourselves at 10,500 on V23 between the Redding VOR and the Fort Jones VOR. Summertime, clear skies, calm air, good autopilot, bodies still reasonably flexible. We moved the two front seats back as far as possible, got naked, and joined the mile high club. I didn’t really expect it to be any kind of a turn-on, we were just doing it to be able to say we had done it, but we both remarked afterwards that it had been a real turn-on.