Los Angeles (CNN) Two fiercely competitive helicopter pilots who battled to bring the world the first pictures of the O.J. Simpson car chase now find themselves on the same side of a much different battle.

They are fighting stereotypes after transitioning to women.

Both pilots spent their lives holding on to the same difficult secret, including during their brush with international attention. And both found the courage to change how the world sees them.

"I was sitting on my bed with a gun in my lap. That's when it came to me," Zoey Tur said. "I was considering suicide. I had been growing more and more depressed. I couldn't control it any longer. I had been to a million doctors, and there was no treatment for this."

Dana Vahle had heard the same thing decades earlier. The former Army helicopter pilot just assumed she would never feel whole. She would have to live inside a body that felt all wrong.

"I ended up getting married, went in the Army, got a job, had a kid," she shared. "But that feeling was always there. It never went away."

Rival pilots, historic moments

Both pilots knew of each other, partly because they competed on two of the biggest news stories in modern history: the O.J. Simpson chase and the Rodney King riots.

Back then, their names were Dirk Vahle and Bob Tur.

"I didn't like Dirk Vahle, and Dirk Vahle didn't like me," Tur said.

"Bob had a reputation in the industry. (He) was confrontational (and) was not particularly well-liked by the rest of the people," Vahle remembered.

Vahle and Tur were the eyes in the sky for rival news stations the day Los Angeles experienced the country's worst single episode of urban unrest. It was April 29, 1992, after four Los Angeles police officers were acquitted in the beating of motorist Rodney King.

Dana Vahle flew helicopters for films and stunts, and sometimes news.

Tur and a camera operator caught the very first spark of riots that would rage for days, leaving dozens dead.

Vahle wasn't even supposed to be flying for news that week. Movies and stunts were Vahle's day job, not news. By then, Vahle had flown for several Hollywood movies , sometimes as an onscreen pilot and sometimes flying off camera to film from the sky.

"That day, the full-time pilot (for the news station) called and said he needed help," Vahle said.

Just minutes after lifting off, Vahle said, the view looked very much like a movie scene, except it was real life.

"I started pre-flighting the aircraft and found a bullet hole in it," Vahle said. "Once we were up there, you could see the smoke, and no one was on the freeway, which never happens in Los Angeles."

Two years later, both pilots found themselves maneuvering to get the best shots of the most famous police chase in modern American history, that of Simpson, in a white Ford Bronco, on the streets and highways of the city.

Simpson had failed to turn himself in to the Los Angeles Police Department at the agreed-upon time after being accused in the stabbing death of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.

Zoey Tur and a camera operator caught the first spark of the 1992 L.A. riots.

"This is someone that had golfed with the president. This is somebody that everybody knew, everyone welcomed as family," Tur said. "O.J. Simpson transcended color. He was a celebrity, he was loved, and now below me, I'm watching a man running from the police who might very well find himself, like many black men, being shot to death."

Vahle had just seen Simpson in person weeks before the chase. The football legend-turned-actor was the star of a locally shot TV movie called "Frog Man," for which Vahle was a pilot. Unlike Simpson's real-life chase drama, the movie never aired.

"I was like 'Really, I'm gonna go from having worked on that TV movie to this?' " Vahle said. "I've done other chases. That was not unusual to do -- but this one certainly was."

The two pilots arrived at the same address where the chase ended and remained in the air. Simpson sat for a long time in the passenger seat of the Bronco as police tried to negotiate. He told police that he was holding a gun to his head.

"What O.J. didn't know, and what the public didn't know, was that in my ear, I'm also listening to the LAPD SWAT team talking on their two-way radios, and what they were saying was, you know, they had him in their sights," Tur said.

As night fell and the helicopters hovered, Simpson eventually surrendered.

'The only treatment ... was transitioning'

As Tur and Vahle helped capture real and cinematic dramas, the two pilots were dealing with their own personal ones.

Both men were married. They had children. They had good jobs. They seemingly had what they needed to be happy. But they weren't.

Vahle remembers having a sense that he was in the wrong body as a teen. He never told his parents partly because tragedy struck.

"When I was 15, my brother was killed," Vahle said. "I didn't feel like adding another complication to life."

In the 1980s, as an adult, he made some early steps toward transitioning. He told his job in Wisconsin and said he was basically told to "go away," he recalled. He told his wife, and they divorced. But they had a child together, and Vahle decided to follow his ex-wife to California. He gave up his transitioning efforts.

The bond between Vahle and his wife stayed strong, and they rekindled their relationship and had three more children. But 24 years after moving to Los Angeles, the marriage was over for the second time.

Vahle decided it was time to make the biggest change of his life.

"This is especially hard to do in your 50s, when you've spent your whole life being conditioned to be, and act, like a man," said Vahle.

Tur said that as a man, he had descended into depression. Nine years after he watched Simpson hold a gun to his head, Tur was contemplating doing the same, and pulling the trigger. He had been to so many doctors and gotten similar advice but couldn't seem to take it.

"The only treatment they kept telling me was transitioning," Tur said. At his lowest point, it finally sank in. It was time.

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"What I have is not political. It's a medical condition that was treated. I'm cured. I'm done. It's not a mental illness. There are differences in the brain," she said.

Tur had her surgeries in Thailand. "I can't say enough about how good that experience was. I experienced very little pain," she said.

A few months into her transition, Vahle reached out to Tur through a friend.

"Why should I call that a*****e?" Tur recalled thinking. "Well, Dirk is now Dana," the friend replied.

Zoey Tur picked up the phone and called Dana Vahle.

"It gets crazier. I know six other pilots that have done this. Six other helicopter pilots, yeah, and that doesn't even include the airline pilots," Tur said and then with a big laugh continued, "so stay out of helicopters."

'Ripped apart by prejudice'

For Tur, it's been a whirlwind of television appearances. She became an entertainment correspondent for a time. But she says she lost that job because of a barrage of negative social media messages. She laughs it off saying it was probably "Russian bots."

"For a time, I lost everyone. I lost my family. I lost my friends. You lose everything just for the opportunity to get everything," Tur said.

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Vahle still wants to fly helicopters for television shows and movies but says she can't get the work. "They'll talk to you and say everything is great. No problem. But they don't hire you," she said. "You are considered part of the stunt community, which tends to have its own issues with women, much less trans women."

Tur said she has written off her generation as far as being accepted for who she is. She says she is banking on millennials as a force of understanding and acceptance.

"They're our future, if they have a future," she added. "Because we may not survive as a nation. We're being ripped apart by prejudice."