The Closest She Got: A Night at LAX for Captain Muller's Daughter

One year ago, Sara Muller sat in her car outside our Los Angeles cargo office, trying to find the nerve to walk in.

Her father, Captain Muller, flew for Kalitta Air. He passed away in 2020. Sara didn't want a tour that day — she just wanted to see one of his airplanes. When she called the office and tried to explain, the words wouldn't come. The closest she got was a restaurant across the street, watching our freighters land in the distance.

This June, on what would have been her father's birthday, Sara posted in a Kalitta Air fan group on Facebook that she still dreamed of seeing his world up close.

The response came almost immediately — from crew members who flew with her father, from people across the company, from strangers who simply felt it needed to happen. A few weeks later, Sara walked through the gate at our LAX outstation as our guest, during a live overnight turnaround of a 767 bound across the Pacific — the same kind of flight her father captained for years.

"It's such a fulfillment of a dream of mine since I was so little," Sara told us on the drive in. "I know that this is a lot of people pulling a lot of strings, and I'd like to think it's because my dad meant so much to this company — being able to do this for his memory, to have a piece of him again, is so sweet."

Waiting for her was loadmaster Chris Chavez, who flew with Captain Muller — and who came in on his day off to walk Sara through her father's world. Around him, crews who worked alongside her dad shared their memories: a captain who came down from the cockpit to walk the cargo himself, who checked every net and every strap, who did things right even when nobody was watching.

Over the course of the night, Sara stood beneath a 767 for the first time. She lay down in the crew rest bunks her father had described her whole childhood. ("Dad could sleep anywhere," she laughed, "but his snoring was probably louder than the whole plane.") And in the cockpit, she sat in the right seat, across from the captain's chair her father spent his career in, holding the one photograph she has of him at work.

"This is way different than Dad's simulator at home," she said, taking in the panel of switches around her.

The night's most striking audio didn't survive the tarmac — jet engines and a working ramp are unkind to microphones — but some of what Sara said deserves to be kept, so we're keeping it here.

On how the visit came together: "You'd think social media is so saturated now, but a classic Facebook group — it's such a small community, and everyone was willing to hear me just asking, is there any way this could happen? The camaraderie within people in aviation is kind of a brotherhood. I'm reaping the secondhand benefit of my dad's relationships. I feel quite lucky."

And on what a night like this means: "This is allowing me to have a good closing to a chapter. Not that closure means I forget my dad — it's closure the way a funeral gives closure. It allows you to remember somebody. To see a piece of his life I'd only heard about and never got to see."

By the time the freighter pushed back for its 2:30 a.m. departure, Sara had seen it all — the loading, the paperwork, the crew climbing aboard, the machine her father was part of lifting off into the dark, right on schedule.

"I'm just so thankful," she said, "to an entire team of people that answered the call of a stranger."

To our LAX team, to Chris, and to everyone across Kalitta Air who made this night happen: thank you. And to Captain Muller — years on, your crews still talk about you. That says everything.

In memory of Captain Muller. With gratitude to the Muller family for sharing his story.

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