On the same wavelength … Alfredo and Carolina, who have been together for 25 years. Photograph: Benja Villela/The Guardian View image in fullscreen On the same wavelength … Alfredo and Carolina, who have been together for 25 years. Photograph: Benja Villela/The Guardian Relationships ‘It was a sweet, tender voice’: the pilot who fell for his air traffic controller – before ever seeing her Alfredo Bravo had a job he loved and was determined never to be grounded by marriage and kids. Then a voice from the control tower changed everything
Prefer the Guardian on Google A lfredo Bravo had landed aeroplanes in a lot of sticky situations – as a bush pilot in Chilean Patagonia and as a commercial pilot in rural China – but it was a singular voice floating over the radio waves from air traffic control in Santiago, Chile , that set his heart aflutter, upended his concentration and reshuffled his life.
It was the 1990s and, although he was still young, Bravo had held pretty much every low-level flying gig possible. He had dumped plumes of orange chemicals on to forest fires and flown surveillance missions to detect illegal fireplaces polluting the already smoggy Santiago airspace. He had completed hundreds of flights with photo crews operating a big Hasselblad camera as they mapped tree farms, calculating the heights of trees in a forest owned by a timber company involved in a low-level guerrilla war with the Indigenous Mapuche. As a pilot for the company, Bravo was a conspicuous outsider who slept in the fields amid the Indigenous communities, and worked alone in the hangar. But Bravo had a pair of aces up his sleeve.
His first was that he was not Chilean. Bravo was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, a quietly functional socialist democracy with a mass middle class, an erudite populace, and a fleet of dilapidated motorcars – a bit like Cuba might have become had things worked out. Thus he avoided the vitriol directed towards the Chilean government for its three-centuries-long campaign of repression of Indigenous peoples.
Bravo’s second ace was his generous nature. On his days off, the young pilot began offering free flights, and spent his Saturdays and Sundays twirling local kids into the air. “Soon after, the community adopted me, they sent me food all the time,” says Bravo.
Flying was Bravo’s game, and he promised himself never to let children or a family get in the way of his free-flying lifestyle. “When I saw people on the highway with bicycles in the car and three kids inside, I would think: ‘Poor guy. That guy is crazy.’”
Then, in 1999, while preparing to land at a small airfield in the Vitacura neighbourhood of Santiago, Bravo heard her voice for the first time. He has never forgotten that first heart-thumping moment. “‘OK’, I told myself, ‘Alfredo, come on. Yeah, her voice is very nice but …’”
View image in fullscreen ‘Her voice transmitted warmth’ … Alfredo and Carolina. Photograph: Handout Bravo began to invent reasons to talk to the air traffic controllers. How could he match a face to that voice? It took him weeks. Pilots and air traffic controllers had mismatched schedules; controllers worked for three to five days, then had two or three days off. There were few routines, few fixed schedules.
Bravo invented excuses to visit the control tower. “I got into the tower, officially on some stupid tour,” says Bravo, of his first visit. He had waited until it was winter and air traffic at the small field was reduced to fewer takeoffs and l…