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Spring 2019 Character Sketch |
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Author's Note: The following is a descriptive character sketch for a character I used for some of my assignments during the Spring 2019 semester at university in my Creative Writing: Fiction course. The story events will follow.
Character Sketch
For my first character of the semester, I shall go with a male character named ‘Simon David Ernest.’ At the age of 35, he uses the pronouns of he/him. He is a Commercial Charter Airline Pilot, meaning that he flies general aviation aircraft for various business clientele throughout the United States and the world. Most of his flights are domestic, although he does frequently get sent with his employer’s Cessna Hawkeye 3-26, registration N-284NO to various countries throughout Europe, Australia, and Asia with his more prominent clients. He wears the traditional pilot uniform of black dress pants with a white button down shirt. The shirt has wings above the left breast pocket and epaulets on both shoulders. As he is the Captain on the aircraft, his epaulets hold four gold bars on each.
He holds an Airline Transport Pilot (ATP) certification from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in addition to his Commercial Pilot’s License (CPL) with Instrument Rating (IR) that allows him to navigate the aircraft based upon the instruments in the cockpit, rather than visually referencing objects on the ground to know where he is. He also holds a high altitude endorsement which allows him to fly fixed wing aircraft above 24, 000 feet mean sea level (Flight Level 240). He completed his training at L3 Flight Academy in Sanford, Florida, training with Cessna 172s and Piper Seminoles before going to work for his current employer.
He does currently have some confidence issues at times and is known to sometimes question his own decisions within the cockpit. For example, he once made an emergency landing because his new watch at the time had made a beeping sound which he didn’t recognize and he thus thought that there was something wrong with the aircraft’s instruments. His employer wasn’t impressed given how that emergency had cost her $15, 000 in landing fees and dumped fuel, to which he was made to fly for free for two weeks as compensation for his blunder, without notifying the Department of Labor.
He's originally from Wakefield in West Yorkshire, England, and although he still has a Yorkshire dialect accent, he is careful not to talk as if he were from Yorkshire when out in public, given that most people not from the North of England would likely be confused about what he was talking about if he were to say something like “Put t’ wood i’ t’ ‘oile,” which is a West Yorkshire county slang for “Shut the door.”
Simon is clean shaven, as is standard for commercial pilots, and although some do have a well groomed mustache, he himself does not have one. He remains semi-focused and committed to his job, even playing Microsoft Flight Simulator X once he gets home after a day of flying, and goes through procedures and such on his laptop to help keep in shape before his next flight. However, he and his First Officer do tend to do things which the FAA would frown upon if they knew, an example being ‘Spot the Lemon,’ where you hide a lemon in plain sight somewhere inside the aircraft during flight, and the other players take turns trying to find it.
He’s currently on his third marriage, of which the complexity is unusual given that his first wife sadly passed away from cancer, and he met his third wife at the wedding to his second wife, with the second marriage having been annulled only 45 minutes after the wedding ceremony, because he had vomited on his bride after a single glass of champagne. His current marriage to Charlotte though is going strong in his mind, with both of his daughters supporting him in his work. His first daughter, Sarah Denise Ernest, was born 3 months after he graduated from high school (to his first wife), and his third wife gifted him with his second daughter, Ashleigh Kristine Ernest.
He lives in Manassas, Virginia and operates out of Manassas Regional Airport with Titanic Air (the owner and his boss, Helen Lock, decided to say that her lone airplane could never be capable of crashing, and so gave the company that name). When the company is not ferrying passengers, of which their maximum load is 15 passengers, they are sometimes hired to transport cargo in the hold of the aircraft.
Simon’s colleagues at Titanic Air are not exactly the brightest bulbs, though it’s partly because his co-pilot/First Officer Robbie Saunders, loves to try and be sneaky, going so far as to steal ‘The Balvenie 50 Year Old Single Malt Scotch Whisky’ from the galley which is valued at $45, 000 a bottle (reserved for only their most prestigious clientele), simultaneously defeating Helen whenever she tries to catch Robbie in the act. The Flight Attendant, Craig Beecham, is a complete idiot, as anyone who has ever met him will attest. Indeed, he is the sort of person who will read a single page in a book about a given topic, and declare that he is an expert on said topic, simply because he read that individual page.
Waffle King Richard · Fri Jun 07, 2019 @ 05:30pm · 0 Comments |
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