Commercial pilot Charlie Dadoun finds clouds of faith as he soars through the skies. Eytan Kobre joins him for a midnight flight through the NY skyline.

T
he transatlantic flight was rocking back and forth in a turbulent stretch, and one passenger in first class, a religious Jew, was none too happy. “After all the money I spent on my ticket, I expected a smoother ride,” he said to the flight attendant. He asked her to convey his message to the captain, which she did, whereupon a message came back from the cockpit: “Pray to Hashem.” The passenger nearly flipped out: “Who is that pilot?!”

“That pilot” was Charles Dadoun, a member of the Sephardic frum community in West Long Branch, New Jersey, who’s been flying the world’s skies as a commercial airline pilot for over 30 years. And the line was typical Charlie, dealing simultaneously with a difficult flying scenario and a slightly goofy passenger as he’s dealt with so many situations over his career: with grace under pressure, an impish sense of humor, and a gentle dose of Torah inspiration.

Charlie invited me out to New Jersey on a beautiful early April evening to meet at a favorite haunt, the Monmouth Executive Airport in Farmingdale, where he’s offered to take me for a spin in a single-engine Cessna. With the hour nearing midnight, it’s not windy at all, a great night for flying. But it’s a bit chilly out and before lifting off for the heavens, we sit in Charlie’s warm SUV as he shares a bit about himself, the passions that combine to make him a rarity — a Torah-observant Jew who navigates the biggest flying machines known to man — and, of course, what happened to him on that September day in 2001.

Shabbos Protects

Flight 93, from Newark to San Francisco, was Charlie’s regular route for years; he flew it on alternating Mondays and Tuesdays. Yet he wasn’t in the cockpit that fateful Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, when terrorists hijacked the plane and crashed it in a Pennsylvania field. Why not? The answer can be summed up in a word: Shabbos.

According to Charlie, being a Shabbos-observant commercial pilot is an ongoing challenge. On several occasions he’s had to spend Shabbos at the airport because the flight landed too late to make it home or to a hotel. As for his flight schedule, he says he “never takes things for granted. My monthly schedule is made a month ahead of time and it’s a miracle each time I avoid problems. Everything works with seniority: I stayed as an engineer for three years when I could have already been a copilot; I stayed a copilot when I could have been the airline’s youngest captain at age 26. But I gave that all up because I couldn’t have kept Shabbat. ”

But it could also be said that Shabbos Kodesh has kept him. In the years leading up to September 11, Charlie piloted a A320 Airbus when he flew the Flight 93 route. Then, in the summer of 2001, the airline decided to use a larger plane, the 767, for Flight 93. Since Charlie had been flying an Airbus, he was moved to another route.

In the aviation field, the bigger the plane a pilot flies, the more money he gets paid, so Charlie put in a bid to fly the 767 on the Flight 93 route. But when a friend told him that the 767 fleet was shrinking due to the economy, he realized he wouldn’t have the seniority that would allow him to keep Shabbat, and he withdrew his bid.

And so it was that on the morning of September 11, while Flight 93 was being hijacked, Charlie was just departing Seattle in his Airbus.

Flight Plan

Guarding Shabbos is nothing new for the Dadoun family. Charlie was born in Casablanca, Morocco, which, he notes proudly, was home to the Rif, Ohr HaChaim, and many other great rabbis. He was five when his family left for France due to the upheavals and animosity triggered by the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. They traveled first to Paris, where Mrs. Dadoun had family, but her husband, David, preferred America and decided to move the family there.

Along the way, however, they stopped in Canada, where many Moroccans had settled, and ended up in Montreal, where Mr. Dadoun organized the first early minyan in the Ohr HaChaim synagogue. He was blessed with a magnificent voice, which he used to train Charlie and countless other boys in the reading of their bar mitzvah parshiyos and haftaros.

Charlie grew up trilingual, speaking French, Arabic, and Hebrew. His fascination with flight began early, and he spent many hours building model airplanes, miniature motorized ones his father would buy for him. Even in grade school, he recalls, a favorite recess-time activity was to “scan the skies for flights. We had the airline schedules and we’d point and say, ‘That’s Eastern’ or ‘There goes Air Canada.’ ”

David Dadoun had started a very successful electronics import-export concern and taught Charlie the ropes of the trade from a young age, assuming he’d join him in the business. But Charlie liked being in the outdoors more than confined within four walls, and when he was 16, his father suggested he take a flying lesson. He loved it right from the start and eventually earned his pilot’s license.

From there it was on to Melbourne, Florida, where he attended the Florida Institute of Technology, an aeronautics engineering school run by ex-military pilots, where the curriculum included both the technical aspects of flying, such as engineering and mathematics, and constant actual flying practice.

Charlie remembers well the week in February 1987 when he received a letter confirming he had a pilot’s job waiting for him with a major airline; as it happened, that same week, another letter arrived, with the local Israeli consulate’s return address. It informed Charlie that his request to fly an F-16 fighter in the Israeli Air Force had been accepted, assuming he excelled during two weeks of intensive training.

The opportunity to fly a fighter jet was a dream come true for Charlie, but he remained torn between the two enticing choices that lay before him. He turned to his parents for guidance, and his mother decided they should consult the Tosher Rebbe, to whom her family had been turning for blessings and advice for many years.

On a Motzaei Shabbos, Charlie drove to the tzaddik’s home near Montreal and presented the two letters he’d received. “The Rebbe looked at me and at the letters, and pointed to the one from the airline. My eyes widened, and his gabbai explained that the Rebbe was advising that ‘for your neshamah, go this way.’ Instinctively, I began to protest, ‘But Rebbe, the mitzvah of protecting fellow Jews, living in the land!’ But the Rebbe was firm: ‘Hashem has many messengers. For your neshamah, you go here.’ ”

The next day Charlie became so ill he had to go to the hospital. While his illness mystified the doctors, he says he soon figured out the cause: He shouldn’t have questioned the Rebbe’s wisdom. “I remember praying for forgiveness while lying on a stretcher. Later that afternoon, I began to regain my equilibrium. All these many years later, I have no doubt that the path I chose was correct, because life isn’t about machines but about nurturing the neshamah. We in Montreal were blessed to attach ourselves to the Tosher Rebbe ztz”l, whose holiness still awes me.”

This Is Your Captain Speaking

Once someone has mastered the basics of flying a plane, the goal — if he wants to eventually fly a commercial airliner — is to accumulate flying time, since airlines will only hire someone with as many as 8,000 hours’ experience. An aspiring pilot can accumulate those hours by becoming a flight instructor, teaching others how to fly small planes, and by flying for the smaller commuter lines, until he’s ready for the big leagues. The airlines, Charlie observes, “aren’t there to teach people how to fly, they want people who know how to fly.”

There are two routes to becoming a pilot with the airlines, with some coming from the military and others who bring prior commercial aviation experience. It used to be that 90 percent of commercial airline pilots had flown previously in the military, where the experience of flying under very tough conditions and staying calm under fire is great training for dealing with in-air crises. Of course, an airliner doesn’t handle like a fighter jet, so the airlines provide “upset training,” in which a flight simulator turns the plane sideways and upside down and the pilot has to learn how to extricate himself from the situation.

But now that the industry has expanded and there’s a need for more pilots, Charlie say the airlines are more open to hiring people who have flown commuter planes. “Unlike a fighter pilot, who flies solo as a one-man show, these pilots have flown with a crew and so they understand the importance of crew members sharing information and feedback with each other. They’re also more familiar with weather patterns and airport procedures.

“If you look at the last two Korean Airlines airliner crashes, they had captains who came from the military — the copilots were afraid to speak up when their superiors piloted the planes recklessly. It’s due to the improvement in communications between crew members, especially here in the US, that we have many fewer accidents than we used to have. But even if you have one pilot who’s a former military guy and another who’s not, we have standard operating procedures that we both have to follow, so that makes us a team.”

Turbulence Ahead

Thirty-two years and over 30,000 miles later, Charlie Dadoun flies the skies of the world as if it’s second nature, with confidence and unflappable calm, captaining a 787 to destinations in Europe, Asia, and beyond. Of course, Charlie’s had his share of “white-knuckle” moments.

“There isn’t a pilot out there who doesn’t have story of how he almost bit the dust,” he says. “With thousands of hours logged and all kinds of intense flying circumstances, it’s impossible that there isn’t one moment when you thought you weren’t going to make it. It’s just a law of averages.”

Just months before the famous 2009 episode in which Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger brought his disabled US Airways jetliner in for a smooth landing on the Hudson River with no casualties, Charlie had a very similar experience. Shortly after takeoff from Sacramento, his aircraft hit an entire flock of large birds, with the impact taking the nose off the aircraft and torpedoing the radar.

“The engine almost died, forcing a return to the airport, and it was a huge mess, with dead geese all over and blood from one wing to the other,” Charlie recalls. “It smelled like roast duck — which was fitting, since it was Thanksgiving! We’ve also gotten hit by lightning, which makes it sound like a bomb went off.”

Charlie says the most important thing to learn from Sullenberger is that it’s essential “to make a decision and feel comfortable with it and not look back. It’s not an easy decision to land an airplane on the water, but had he tried to land on land, most probably he wouldn’t have made it.” He notes also that there are pre-takeoff standard operating procedures, or SOPs, as they’re known, and that following them removes many of the risks of flight.

But because he’s a Jew who takes his religion seriously, Charlie never takes even a routine, uneventful flight for granted. “The Gemara says that in the olden days, it was the sailors who had a lot of emunah because they never knew what was going to happen in the ocean. I think the modern-day sailors are the pilots. I find that most of them are quite humble.”

Ground Support

Charlie comments that even after all these years, he still feels like a kid when he flies. “I’m taking pictures and marveling at Hashem’s creation. The beautiful things you see at an altitude of 35,000 or 40,000 feet are just amazing.”

But it was another picture that made its way into the pages of Mishpacha last year, one of Captain Dadoun learning Torah in the cockpit with a rabbi, and Charlie shares the backstory. On Chol Hamoed Pesach, prior to a Newark–Los Angeles trip, Charlie noticed that the water bottles on board, which contained artificial flavoring, bore an OU but no kosher l’Pesach certification. After consulting his rabbi, who advised against drinking the water, Charlie  went back into the terminal to find water with an OU-P. When he saw a line of religious Jews waiting to get on his flight, he decided to buy two dozen of the approved bottles, distributing them to frum passengers after boarding.

Meanwhile, it had begun to snow, and with an hourlong flight delay on his hands, Charlie invited Rabbi Michel Chill to join him in learning that day’s daf in Zevachim. Hearing that, his copilot said, “Charlie, you wanna learn with your rabbi?” and got up to give the rabbi his seat at the controls. The rabbi’s son-in-law snapped the iconic photo of the chavrusas.

For all its ostensible glamour, the job of airline pilot with a major airline is no easy matter for an Orthodox Jew, and Charlie’s the first to say he couldn’t do it without the support of two people in particular. First there’s his wife, Lauren, mother of their five children; he says she “deserves all the diamonds in the world. She has to put up with raising our family with me being away a lot.” On the positive side of things, he says, “The good thing about flying is that when I’m home, I’m home. I can be home for three, four days at a time.  Also, when I shut the engine off, I can just go. I don’t have to worry about anything else, not about the business or who is or isn’t going to pay me.”

Then there’s his spiritual lifeline, Rabbi Reuven Semah, rav of the Magen Avraham congregation and head of the Ma’or High School in West Long Branch, where the Dadouns have lived since 1992. “I ask him all my halachah questions and we’re always texting each other. He has taught me so much Torah. We’ve been doing the daf yomi for 21 years, we have a halachah class every Monday, and on Shabbat we pray haneitz and then we learn Mishnah Berurah with Rabbi Candiotti and masechet Succot with Rabbi Semah.”

It was Rabbi Semah who gave him the book The International Dateline in Halacha, which explains the various issues concerning that topic. But Charlie says he has avoided flying across the international dateline because of the halachic issues it raises, such as what day it is and when to pray. “It’s only three weeks ago that, for the first time, I had to fly to Beijing and crossed the dateline.”

For his part, Rabbi Semah calls Charlie “a special guy. He’s very dedicated to his Yiddishkeit, and he’s very moser nefesh to keep Shabbos and Yom Tov, which is a big challenge. I imagine he would be on a higher level of seniority if not for that. He’s very makpid on kashrus, including chalav Yisrael, which is very difficult when you’re flying all over the world, and he’s also careful to put on Rabbeinu Tam tefillin. He’s always ready to speak to anybody about Torah u’mitzvos. Anytime he sees a Jew who’s lost, who’s thinking about marrying a goy, he tries to reach out to them.”

Rabbi Semah adds that at first it wasn’t easy for Charlie to break into their tight-knit Syrian community; some people were wary of this outsider. “But today he’s the most popular guy in the shul. He’ll do a favor for anybody.” Rabbi Semah was himself a recipient of one of those favors when he once needed to go to Eretz Yisrael. “Charlie got me a standby ‘buddy’ ticket that pilots are able to procure for family and friends. But when it came time for the flight, it was full and it looked like there wasn’t going to be room for me. To make sure I got on it, Charlie came along with me to Eretz Yisrael and then flew right back home, and I stayed there. That’s the kind of person he is.”

“First We’re Jews”

As someone who travels the world in a high-profile position, Charlie is forever conscious of being a Torah Jew. He wishes others would be too, although that’s not always the case. Once, he received word in the cockpit of a complaining passenger, and the captain told him, as copilot, to go back and see what was wrong. “It turned out to be a nice chassidish man, so I used my Yiddish — which I learned as a kid in Montreal — to say, ‘Vos iz dos?’ He told me he hadn’t gotten his kosher meal, so I said, ‘You’re flying 12 hours to Argentina and you didn’t bring along your own food? I always bring my own.’ I brought him three full kosher airline meals I had.”

But there are issues on the other end of the religious spectrum, too. When there’s a sick passenger on board, pilots ask if there are any doctors present who can help out; when they do, Charlie had a practice of showing thanks by giving them little bottles of wine from the plane’s stock. One time, however, the doctor gave Charlie her card and her name told him she was Jewish. “I realized I couldn’t give her our wine, which is nonkosher, so I said, ‘I need to take that bottle back, and I’ll give you whiskey instead.’ ” When she refused the offer and drank the wine instead, he stopped that practice.

Almost without exception, he observes, the people with whom he shares the cockpit respect him for his beliefs. On one of his first trips to London, he wanted to take in the city’s sights but was so jetlagged he just went to straight to his hotel to sleep his exhaustion off. The next thing he knew, it was morning and the captain was banging on his door saying, “Charlie, we’re waiting for you!” Already late for his flight, he wondered when and where he’d be able to pray. International flights always have three-man crews, a captain and two copilots, enabling one copilot to be in the cockpit while the other takes a two-hour break to sleep. That morning, Charlie asked for the early-morning break and used it to put on his tallis and tefillin and pray right in the cockpit.

But there are the rare, disturbing exceptions. On a flight to Argentina with Charlie as copilot, the captain kept staring at Charlie’s meal with deep blue eyes. “’What is that?’ he asked me, and I replied, ‘It’s a kosher meal.’ He asked if I’m Jewish and I said I am and he didn’t speak to me the whole way to Argentina. Then, as we’re going up the escalator in the airport, he motioned toward me as he told the other copilot, ‘Step in front of him, he’s a Jew.’ We were shocked.”

When the pilot once again stared at Charlie’s kosher meal during the return trip from Argentina, Charlie decided to speak up.

“Sir, can I ask you something?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

“Do you have a German background?”

“Yes, I do.”

“You know, sir, I could tell.”

“We didn’t say another word to each other,” Charlie recounts, “and when we landed, we each went our separate ways.”

In his understated way, Charlie shares the lesson he lives, whether he’s at home with his family on the Jersey shore or flying the friendly skies around the globe: “First we’re Jews. You’ve got to wake up in the morning and serve Hashem. You’ve got to learn. You can be a doctor or a lawyer, you can be a billionaire, but you’ve got be a Jew first.”

On a Wing and a Prayer  (Not Necessarily in That Order)

Like an actuary who does math puzzles for fun, commercial airline pilot Charlie Dadoun also flies a single-engine Cessna because, he says, “The experience of flying this thing is different from an airliner, very hands-on. You know, stick-and-rudder.” He uses it for things like taking his kids to Hershey Park, or giving rides to the guests at his son’s bar mitzvah. Or to give a magazine writer a deeply nerve-racking — and truly exhilarating — flying experience of a lifetime.

It was after 11 p.m. on a cold Monday evening when, at Charlie’s invitation, I arrived with photographer Shulim Goldring at the Monmouth Executive Airport. I assumed Charlie would be taking us for a short spin a few hundred feet in the air, giving us a grand tour of local South Jersey attractions like, maybe, the nearby Dairy Queen.

After we’d sat in Charlie’s warm SUV and schmoozed about his life and work for an hour, it was time to go airborne, and Charlie pulled the Cessna out of its hangar by hand. We bundled into the plane — a glorified sardine can with a propeller out front, which can’t accommodate more than 600 pounds of combined passenger weight (good thing I’d had a light supper). We buckled up, and Charlie started up the engine. Since it would be dangerous to fly without the engine oil being sufficiently heated, we sat for some time with the engine running. Then we began moving slowly down the taxiing lane lined by blue lights, making our way toward the runway lined by white lights.

Finally, we were ready for takeoff. Charlie delivered an “FAA required passenger briefing” explaining how to open the door and exit the plane if necessary. Very comforting, that. Then, deputizing me as his copilot, he handed me a card from which to read off a checklist to determine that  it was all systems go. “Seats belts?” “Fastened.” “Harnesses?” “Check.” “Brakes?” “Yes.” “Fuel selector?” “Yes.” “Mixture?” “Rich.” Throttle?” “Open quarter inch.” And so on.

Within a half minute of takeoff, several things dawned on me all at once. First, that we were not a few hundred feet up, but more like 1,200 or 1,300 feet in the air. Second, I desperately did not want to be where I was, but had no way of leaving. Although it was short of a panic attack, and I wanted to avoid making a scene that would discomfit our gracious host and make me out to be a coward (which, of course, I was), I was feeling slightly frantic. Charlie kept thoughtfully offering us a bag, but I explained that it wasn’t my stomach I was concerned for, but my heart.

Although technically we were on a plane, this was not anything remotely like flying on a commercial airliner. It’s the difference between the theoretical and the real. On those big planes, where looking out the window you see nothing but a bed of clouds and don’t even feel the plane moving, you’ve got  to work hard to really bring home the reality that you’re miles above the earth’s surface rather than sitting in a flight simulation machine. On board this tiny Cessna, however, the reality of being suspended midair is as close as the door next to me and as vivid as the view through its window of the earth and sea just one-third mile below us.

From the pit of my stomach, a soundless “Help!!” welled up, but got caught in my throat and stayed there. But I did allow my arm to inch behind Charlie’s seat and grab hold of its left side, where it remained tightly anchored for the duration of the flight.

None of these feelings were connected, mind you, to any real sense of danger of a midair mishap or crash landing. It was, after all, the calmest evening imaginable for flying, and sitting at the controls, Charlie was the very picture of composure and competence. It was really about vulnerability and helplessness, the inability to control my fate — and that’s when I realized I was sitting in a hands-on workshop on bitachon.

The only thing that had worked to calm me a bit thus far was looking over at steady-as-they-come Charlie, for whom this was all just a lark, a ho-hum walk in the park. But then, I thought, didn’t the Psalmist say, “al tivtechu… b’ven adam she’ein lo seshu’a . Trust not in the son of man who can’t even save himself, let alone others?”

Meanwhile, as the Cessna moved steadily north, we realized Charlie’s plans were to give us a tour of far more than a Dairy Queen. He was headed straight for the Big Apple. And with my emotional temperature somewhat reduced, I was able to absorb and enjoy the absolute majesty of the moment.

Since we were beyond the range of a control tower capable of managing air traffic, every few minutes Charlie — identifying us as 7453 Mike — would radio our location and destination for all other aircraft in the vicinity to hear and take heed. But in response there was only radio silence — at 1 a.m., we were all alone in the heavens. On this evening, a frum pilot named Charlie Dadoun owned the skies of New York.

Heading up from Jersey, the plane went sailing high above the towering span of the Verrazzano Bridge, as the immense waters of the Hudson River spread wide below us. Next up to our left was Lady Liberty, standing in glorious solitude, flooded by light as she held aloft her beacon of freedom. And before we knew it, we were passing close by the storied Manhattan skyline on our right, the Freedom Tower jutting up just barely higher than we were. It was magnificent.

Then, with so many skyscrapers nearby, we began to feel the Venturi Effect — when air currents move between buildings and come forcefully bursting out past them — creating some turbulence for the first time on our flight. My fear began to return. And when the plane dipped and swerved as Charlie turned it around for our return trip, only closing my eyes allowed me to keep my composure.

We returned uneventfully to home base shortly before 2 a.m., with a glorious time being had by some. No — all. Given the late hour, the ever-gracious Charlie asked me if the trip had been tiring. “Tiring?” I laughed, “I’ve never been more awake in my life!”

Chovos Halevavos, Shaar Habitachon is a fantastic, essential sefer to learn. But at least once, everyone should hitch a ride over the Verrazzano in a Cessna.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 757)