Cameron Row

By RJ Walters

As Cameron Row and his dad prepared to walk out of the hospital after a long and harrowing day that involved a water skiing accident where Cameron took a terrifying fall and had to be administered CPR, one of the medical professionals made a suggestion that they do just one more scan.

What they saw in the scan prompted an intensive emergency surgery, which Cameron says he had about a 50-50 chance of making it out of.  

“[The accident] shattered my skull into a bunch of pieces,” he recalls, “and [the doctor] said, if one of the fragments had gone a 10th of a millimeter further, it would’ve killed me.”

Additional tests later revealed Row also had suffered two broken vertebrae and torn the majority of his oblique muscles.

Row, a 2013 graduate of LCS, had just finished his first year of studies at private Christian university Liberty and he had wrapped up an impromptu spell working at Eagle Rock, a Christian camp in Tennessee, but he admits that having titanium mesh plated onto his skull and spending weeks at home on bedrest was a wakeup call of transformative proportions.

He said he had focused on having fun and exploring the newfound freedom of being a college student and had been going through the motions of his faith for a while. 

This accident changed that all.

“I wasn’t living the life I should have, even though I knew I believed it,” he says. “When I was on bedrest I was like, ‘Alright, God, I was on the brink of paying you a visit. I better get my life back in order at this point.’”

To get his life back in any sort of order he had to patiently and faithfully lean on God in an entirely new way.

As a testament to Row’s determination and maybe even a little stubbornness—as he acknowledges he wasn’t ready to just “sit around the house and be in pain”— he managed to get back on campus at Liberty just a week late for the fall semester.

One of Cameron’s favorite professors shared with him how he had been praying fervently for him, and he also posed a question that served as a sort of shock to the system for the returning sophomore.

“He mentioned, ‘You realize this is gonna be a big fight to be able to fly again, right?’”

To boil down a complex set of conditions that would lead the Federal Aviation Administration to have serious concerns about Cameron operating an aircraft, Row was at a heightened likelihood of seizures, making him a flight risk.

Cameron said his dad was a champ, advocating for him to the FAA and sending them stacks of medical records, but at the end of an almost year long process, the FAA ruled that he could not fly.

For an adventure seeking, free-spirited 19-year old who was trying to fast-track his way to a career as a commercial pilot, his flight had been grounded indefinitely.

What could have been devastating was truthfully not, Cameron said, because God granted him a peace beyond all comprehension.

“Obviously God put this dream on my heart, but it’s just been ripped out from under me. I should be mad about this, I should be upset…but never once was I mad and I couldn’t even get myself to be mad,” he says with a chuckle. “It was one of the weirdest things I’ve ever experienced in my life, just the peace I guess.”

Crazy enough, the fall semester of his junior year he ended up securing an internship with Delta, working in flight operations at their world headquarters in Atlanta. Naturally, he expected it could be torturous to be around pilots in uniform all the time, but remarkably he calls it “probably the best four months of his life,” and that chapter included being part of a Delta commercial and doing almost everything he could imagine—except training to be a pilot and preparing to fly.

When he arrived back at Liberty he consulted with leaders in the aviation department to see if they had an aviation management program, but they did not. What they did have, though, is a Dean of Aviation who was willing to work with Cameron to design the curriculum to create such a degree.

In 2017—after countless hours meeting with professors in a handful of departments to develop and ultimately get the university’s stamp of approval on the new curriculum—he wrapped up his senior capstone project and walked across a stage as the first-ever aviation management degree recipient in the history of the now 53-year-old school. 

By this point, Cameron had seen the supernatural hand of God guide him in so many ways, including:

• The doctor at the hospital who suggested he get one more scan before leaving
• Getting back to school barely a month after undergoing life saving surgery
• The fact that just minutes before his water skiing accident, the driver of the boat had picked up a friend from the dock; that young lady was a certified lifeguard who had special training to deal with back and neck injuries, and she actually administered CPR to Cameron on the boat because he had taken in so much water

So it was just the next step in faith in his journey when Cameron accepted a position at American Airlines as a pilot recruiter and development analyst. He was getting paid by one of the world’s biggest airlines to talk every day to people who had the same drive to be a pilot as he did, but had the medical clearance to fly that he still did not. 

Cameron said his boss was a strong Christian and a huge cheerleader for him, and the job gave him the opportunity to share his testimony time and again. As he settled into the role, nothing happened, in the best sense of the word. He was healthy and seizure free.

He didn’t let himself get too far down the road of “What if…” about potentially getting cleared to fly again, but he had some neurological and cognitive testing done and submitted required paperwork to the FAA for consideration. He expected to wait a few months for a phone call or letter in the mail for a ruling.
Instead, he received a call three days later with a verdict: he was cleared to fly again.

He left American Airlines in late 2019 and by the end of the following summer he had become a certified flight instructor. He eventually was hired on by Envoy, a subsidiary of American Airlines, and in November 2021 he piloted his first commercial flight.

If that was the end of his story, it would be miraculous, but it wasn’t. Cameron said he always dreamed of flying for Delta, and sure enough, after almost two years of flying for Envoy he was offered a position to become a pilot for Delta.

On October 16, 2023, for Flight 2685 from Boston to Chicago, the passengers were flown to their destination by a young man who less than a decade earlier was forced to surrender his dreams to God and had to learn to be grateful just to be alive.

The energetic 28-year-old said there are three reasons why he would allow this experience into his life again if had the choice to remove it from his past: the people he met, the experiences he had and the lessons he learned.

“Even in the dark times, God has a plan,” he says. “I would say the biggest thing He has taught me is to just trust the process…and even when you feel like He’s not there, He is. Just hone into him for the comfort you are seeking.”