Alfredo 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.'â€
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 …'â€
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 landings, with plenty of downtime to plot his approach.
As often as he could, Bravo obtained access to the tower, listening intently for a cadence, a certain lilt as the air traffic controllers on duty answered his invented queries. Was it her? He failed, and failed again to identify her. “It was a very sweet voice, a tender voice. It transmitted warmth,†says Bravo, who only after weeks of trial and error, finally matched the voice to a woman who introduced herself as Carolina Provoste.
Provoste took one look at Bravo and freaked out. From her low desk, all she could see above the partition were his Caribbean-blue eyes and a gaze that she instantly felt she recognised – because she had fallen in love with it in a dream she had when she was a teenager. “The dream was shocking, because I felt so much love that I broke up with my boyfriend,†she now says with a laugh.
The normally loquacious air traffic controller clammed up. “My friends knew I liked deadpan jokes, so they told me to tell him one,†she says. “But I couldn't. I was too nervous.†She grabbed her belongings and sped off to a meeting room, too unnerved to speak to the man her colleagues glowingly referred to as El Uruguayo.
But there was no denying the instant chemistry between them. Bravo decided to up the ante, so he baked a cake, placed it in the cockpit and invented a flight plan that would end with him landing at the airport where Provoste worked.
But the weather was bad and just as he was approaching the landing strip, Provoste ordered him to return to the airport from which he had come.
Their first date was also a disaster. Having little cash, Bravo had got hold of two free cinema tickets, but when he handed them to the usher he was told they had expired a week earlier. At this, Bravo thought it was all over, but Provoste didn't hesitate to pay and keep the flame alight. That night, they shared their first kiss and soon the slow, wintry afternoons provided a perfect excuse for flirting in the control tower during long hours between occasional takeoffs and landings. After work, they travelled together on the bus home – by coincidence, they lived just eight blocks apart.
After a few months of this, an overseas assignment that Bravo had long sought finally came through. Flying for an NGO in the national parks of Mozambique, it would have been safari bush-pilot heaven. But Bravo turned it down immediately. He realised that what he really wanted was to be more grounded, more able to devote himself to this single mother with a three-year-old daughter.
The relationship continued. Bravo was regularly piloting the last scheduled flight to land at Provoste's airport. The airport would be nearly shut down and already darkened, but when he radioed the tower, it was Provoste's turn to impress. “At the last minute, when the sun was setting, she would wait for me and she would turn on the lights,†said Bravo.
Bravo finally asked Provoste to marry him as he descended in an Airbus jet on a flight back to Chile from Brazil. It had taken three months for his landing to coincide with Provoste's shift in the control tower. When the moment finally arrived, Bravo panicked. “First, I had to make sure I was actually talking to her,†he says. â€
“Carolina? Is this you?†asked Bravo, who had a meticulous script at the ready. She was petrified. She knew the proper use of language from air traffic control was strictly Papa Tango Alpha. No one ever uttered personal names or broadcast personal messages. She confirmed her identity, and Bravo, the co-pilot, announced that he had a question. As the captain gave him a side-eye, Bravo asked Provoste to marry him.
Her silence was long and brutal. “I would appreciate your answer,†he drawled. “Before landing.â€
All she could do was stick to protocol, and utter a single word – “Afirmativo.â€
This private conversation was mistakenly broadcast to a dozen pilots, the entire control tower listening live and a class of 15 up-and-coming air traffic safety planners who happened to be taking a tour of the tower. Everyone was astonished by the proposal, the dramatic delay, then Provoste's eventual acceptance, which unleashed a whooping, tear-filled celebration – the tower staff as one collective witness. Pilots high above the clouds broadcast heartfelt congratulations.
For their wedding, Bravo and Provoste went to Morro de São Paulo, a village on an island off the coast of Brazil. “We bought tropical Hawaiian-style clothing on the beach,†says Provoste. “We got married in Havaianas flip-flops.â€
Their witnesses and guests were the 12-person flight crew. The only priest on the island married them after motoring across a lagoon in a fishing boat named Sonho de Icaro – The Dream of Icarus.
Today, they live with their three children in Santiago, Chile, and recently celebrated 25 years together. Bravo revels in a story he can barely believe is true. Provoste describes their original encounter with the astonishment of someone who just yesterday felt a dream come true. Sometimes, for fun, they listen to the old cassette recording of his bumbling cockpit proposal and laugh.
