First black to be chief pilot at a major airline retires

Nobody at Southwest told Louis Freeman he would be the first black pilot in the airline's history when he was hired in 1980. "It never occurred to me," Freeman says, "but when I got here I was the only pilot of color — it didn't take long to figure out." Freeman went on to become the first black chief pilot — a management job — at a major US airline. His most memorable flight carried the body of civil rights icon Rosa Parks to her final resting place. The NAACP had asked the airline to put together an African-American crew. Freeman made his last flight as a Southwest Airlines captain on Thursday, a few days before turning 65, the federal retirement age for airline pilots. As he strode toward the gate at Dallas Love Field, Freeman donned his captain's cap for the last time and reminisced about joining Southwest after six years flying for the Air Force. On Freeman's first flight as co-pilot, he had a moment of panic when the captain gave him a routine command. The weight of being an airline pilot had suddenly hit him. It went beyond that first flight. "I put a whole lot of pressure on myself because I had to get it right," Freeman says. "I had to be perfect because I wanted them to hire more of us." The color barrier in airline cockpits wasn't broken until the mid-1960s. Southwest was less than a decade old when Freeman joined and had just 20 planes and fewer than 200 pilots.<br/>