In 1994, a little boy watched in fascination as his father sat in the captain’s seat.
Almost 30 years later, that boy is Ruben Flowers Jr., and he sat in that same cockpit again — but this time as a Southwest Airlines first officer, right beside his dad. It was in March 2023, during Captain Ruben Flowers’s final flight before retiring, on the route from Omaha to Chicago, the city where he was born.
Flowers Sr.’s love of flying began when he was a child in Michigan, when a pilot invited him into a real cockpit. He never imagined that gesture would end up founding a family with seven pilots, or that his own son would be there, smiling just as he had in that photo, to accompany him on his farewell flight.