Gene Parente
Coming to the Rescue
“Men who are 54 years old should not get into fist-fights and wrestling matches on airplanes,” Gene Parente says. But when a crazed passenger stormed the cockpit door on a Korea Airlines fight in late September, Parente, a leading independent equipment tester and designer of swing robots, sensed that just watching what happened next wasn’t an option. Parente freely admits he didn’t so much volunteer for the job as he was volunteered for it by a trio of terrified and undersize flight attendants. “When he’s yanking on the cockpit door, I’m thinking Uh oh, this is bad.” When all was said and done, and he was sitting on top of the subdued assailant, Parente realized that though his reaction might have been instinctive, no one else made a move, not even the three younger, stronger gentlemen sitting in the same mostly empty business-class section. (Parente was on the return flight from having one of his swing robots go head-to head with Hall of Famer Se Ri Pak in a made-for-Korean-TV golf competition.) “The truth is, I didn’t even think. I suppose it’s good that everyone didn’t jump up, or we’d all have devolved into a bunch of Klingons. I was just trying to de-escalate the situation, and then it got aggressive. But if you ever want to feel like the biggest fraud in the world, try being called a hero over and over and over again. That ain’t me.” —Mike Stachura