“It’s really your love of it that sets you apart.” “I didn’t have a life for 15 years, all I did was breathe and live and eat aerobatic flying and racing and aviation. It’s everything that you do. To be great in this, you have to be 100% committed. You need endurance. It’s a test. Every day is a test. …
Helen Mirren on the Perpetual Pursuit
“The fun is to learn. To just keep that learning process going.” ~ Helen Mirren, who turns 70 this month. She has won an Academy Award for Best Actress, four BAFTAs, three Golden Globes, four Emmy Awards, two Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Awards, and one Tony Award. In 2003, she received a Damehood in the Order of the British …
New Brain Science on Expert Intuition
New brain science shows where expert intuition quickly silently processes information. It’s where master pilots ‘simply’ look outside and see the wind, feel the wing, and just land. It appears that the site of fast, automatic, unconscious cognitive operations—from where a solution materializes all of a sudden—lies in the basal ganglia, linked to but apart from the cortex. These studies …
Phoenician Seamanship Secrets
“I am looking to see whether anything is out of order. There will be no time to look for what is missing or out of place when a storm comes up at sea.” ~ Phoenician seaman, circa 330 BC. The ‘secrets’ of airmanship haven’t really been secret for at least the last 2,500 years! (The unnamed seaman is quoted in …
Work Without Love …
Work to put love and passion into your work, or else it all becomes just work. Mother Teresa said it better:
There is Ecstasy in Paying Attention
We are the Grease in the Cogs
Powerful four minute video by professor and pilot Sidney Dekker introduces what we find when we stop looking at accidents, and instead study highly reliable organizations. It’s resilience: the ability to accommodate change and absorb disturbances without catastrophic failure. And it’s not about reducing negatives, but rather promoting positives. The four behaviors that resilient teams practice are: Don’t take past success …
Button Pushing
“A musician must practice every day. A baseball player must practice every day. Heck, even a clown has to practice. So why do pilots get to push buttons on an autopilot and consider that flying? That is not flying.” ~ Rick Erikson, writing about automation dependency and proficiency in the June 2015 edition of Soaring magazine.
Dale Masters on Cockpit Automation
I fly bare bones routinely, relying on sight and sound and feel in favor of expensive, complex, and distracting gizmos. ~ Dale Masters, 12,000 hours in gliders, instructor at Southern California Soaring Academy, writing in the June 2015 Soaring magazine.
Harrison Ford Flying Again
Happy to see Harrison Ford is flying again. As a pilot he’s the real deal.